RAW: Research, Art, Writing
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium
With Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Benjamin L. Alpers of the University of Oklahoma
Richardson, Texas
March 24, 2012

The Arts & Humanities Graduate Student Association of the University of Texas at Dallas invites you to participate in RAW: Research, Art, Writing, an interdisciplinary graduate student symposium. Organized by and for graduate students in the humanities, the fourth annual RAW symposium continues to build upon the goal of opening up an interdisciplinary conversation.

Graduate work involves the necessary challenge of charting new territory. Accepting this challenge can lead to exciting moments of clarity as well as to crises of questioning: Is my research relevant? Are my methods working? Will others be receptive to my work? How is the profession of the humanities changing? How does this impact my work? The RAW symposium provides a forum for a discussion of these questions.

We invite proposals for 15-20 minute individual presentations as well as submissions of full panels. There are no limitations on field, genre, methodology, or discipline; we welcome presentations from across the range of the humanities—including, but not limited to, philosophy, history, emerging media, art, literature, language—and we especially encourage projects that forge connections and interrogate this practice called "interdisciplinarity."

Examples of possible project submissions include:
• excerpt of an M.A. paper or thesis
• M.F.A. final project
• digital or web-based texts
• excerpt of a seminar paper
• animation, video, or film project
• selection of poetry
• excerpt from a novel, play, or short story
• excerpt from a dissertation chapter

Abstracts (not exceeding 250 words) are due by December 9, 2011. Send submissions and questions to utd.gsa@gmail.com Registration information will follow. For additional information see http://sites.google.com/site/utdgsa.

About Our Keynote:
Dr. Benjamin L. Alpers is Reach for Excellence Associate Professor in the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma, where he has taught since 1998. His primary teaching and research interests concern twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural history, with special interests in political culture and film history. Among the courses he offers in the Honors College are seminars on the Sixties, on film noir, and on American social thought. Ben is the author of Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and is at work on a book entitled Noble Lies: the Embattled Legacy of Leo Strauss in American Public Life. He is currently Publications Chair of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, whose U.S. Intellectual History Blog he edits. He has held a Mellon Fellowship, a sabbatical fellowship from the American Philosophical Society, and the Fulbright Chair in American Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He has served as Vice Chair of the Oklahoma Humanities Council. He has taught at several American universities, including Princeton University and the University of Missouri-Columbia. He received an AB summa cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard University and an MA and PhD in History from Princeton University.