cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Proposals: “Collections and Collaborations”

We are issuing a Call for Proposals for scholarly and creative submissions for an International Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference entitled “Collections and Collaborations” to be held at Indiana University – Bloomington from March 24th – 26th, 2011 (hosted by the graduate students of the IU Department of English).

New media—most notably Web 2.0 (and now 3.0)—have challenged us to think about our artistic creations, social spaces, and most deeply cherished beliefs along increasingly decentered, collectivist lines. Do such technologies push our creative and critical work in more collaborative directions? And given that ideas of collective fictions and culture, collaborations, adaptations, and translations exist in folk traditions, national legends, and the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, is there anything new about collectivity or collaboration?

This conference seeks to investigate the notion of collections and collaborations from a wide array of angles. We hope to receive papers from a variety of disciplines, employing any number of methodologies and considering any time period. Below are some suggestions for possible topics. This list is by no means exhaustive; rather, we hope these ideas might inspire some exciting new thoughts related to the theme:

• Collaborative writing, storytelling, filmmaking, and performance
• Translation, adaptation, remediation
• Intertextuality, particularly across history or genre
• Museums, readings, performances, exhibitions
• The demise (or afterlife?) of the Romantic “genius”
• The death of the author and originality
• Voice and image: multiple voices/images; resonating voices and mirroring images
• Mass audiences
• New media
• Web 2.0/3.0: “crowdsourcing,” “truthiness,” and “collaboratition”
• Digital possibilities for collaborative scholarship
• Collective aesthetics
• Genre studies
• Oral and folk traditions
• National legends and myths of “national character”
• The position of the individual in relation to the collective
• Subaltern, or other imposed collective identities
• Collaborative or collectives truths and faiths
• Utopianism and futurism
• The academy’s “collective fictions” (both its useful fictions and its collective delusions)

We encourage proposals for individual papers as well as panel proposals organized by topic. In the past, this conference has bridged the “critical” and “creative,” and we intend to host both critical and creative panels. Please submit (both as an attachment AND in the body of the email) an abstract of no more than 250 words along with a few personal details (name, institutional affiliation, degree level, email, and phone number) by January 15th, 2011 to .

Visit our website http://www.indiana.edu/~engsac/conference/
for more information!