cfp.english.upenn.edu

The group “Colporteurs” is pleased to announce their annual conference, which will be held on Wednesday, 23 September 2009 at the Department of Italian Studies in Bologna University, Italy.
The chosen subject has been inspired from the theme of this year’s PhD. seminar in “Modern, comparative and Postcolonial literatures”, entitled “Declensions of space”.
This topic seemed to be the most suitable in order to build comparisons between different methodologies and diverse issues which can be traced back to a single, wide concept. In fact, thanking its nature of open and re-definable notion, the subject of space can be studied under many points of view. Moreover, space is an element which can be hardly ignored by any research in the field of Humanities; its scholar relevance is also testified by the large number of publications.

Possible fields of study include:
- comparative literature;
- theory of literature;
- critique;
- literature and the arts (cinema, art, theatre);
- literature and postcolonial studies;
- francophone literatures;
- national literatures;
- cultural studies;
- geocritique and studies on geographic field.

We invite all present and former PhD. Students in Arts and Humanities to join us in the discussion; it is mandatory though to treat the topic in a comparative way.

The proposal, which must be focused on space, can be an already written/published work, or inspired by PhD. Seminar’s lectures. We welcome speeches written purposely for this conference, and which are linked to the student’s research.
Ideally, interventions must not go beyond 15-20 minutes, but their length of time depends on the number of proposals received and accepted.
Interested participants can submit abstracts before Friday, 31st July 2009 at the following e-mail address: colporteurs2009@libero.it. Abstracts must not exceed 500 words or 2000 characters.

Being a student group, we cannot cover travel/accommodation expenses.

For further information please visit our website: http://www.colportage.org/