Call For Papers – "So What?: Exploring the Importance
of Humanities Studies in the 21st Century"

The Association of English Graduate Students at NC State University is pleased to announce the call for papers for our third annual graduate student conference, which will be held February 24-25, 2012 at Tompkins Hall in Raleigh, NC.

In this conference, we wish presenters and participants to examine the continued need for humanities studies, and the place of humanities studies in societies that increasingly value technological advances in communication.

We encourage graduate students from all areas of the humanities to submit and share their research. We welcome submissions that re-frame existing and emerging research to interrogate the significance of humanities studies, and the possible trajectories of the fields that comprise the humanities in the coming decades.

Potential topics might include:
- The role of technology in the academy
- New modes of scholarship
- Interdisciplinary approaches to humanities scholarship
- The ways that language shapes research in all fields
- The changing boundaries of "text"
- Communication between academic and popular readers
- Engaged scholarship
- The function of humanities scholarship in society at large

We welcome submissions from disciplines across the humanities: English studies, literature, linguistics, film studies, creative writing, scientific/technical writing, rhetoric & composition, cultural studies, and others.

Email your submissions to aegs.conference@gmail.com no later than November 15, 2011. Abstracts should be approximately 300 words. Include your name, institution, and course of study in the body of your email. Please remove all identifying markers on the abstract itself. We will send confirmations upon the receipt of your proposal.