cfp.english.upenn.edu

The Association of English Graduate Students at North Carolina 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 as well as the possible trajectories of the fields that comprise the humanities in the coming decades.

Potential questions may include any of the following:
- What significance does an individual’s humanities research have on academia?
- How do individual genre & subject studies (i.e., Renaissance studies, eco-criticism, queer studies, colonial studies, socio-linguistics, etc.) benefit or bolster academic communities and, more importantly, society beyond academia?
- How do changes in literary/humanities research benefit scholars and non-scholars alike?
- What is the role of serious scholarship on popular culture and media, and how might this scholarship change entertainment, scholarship, and communication?
- How might the exploration of linguistic and/or rhetorical history, patterns, and evolution benefit society?
- What is the role of visual texts (moving and still pictures, sculpture, street art, etc.) in commenting on and reacting to cultural and societal shifts?
- How is the role of writing changing in modern society?

We welcome presentations on any topic as long as your work is framed with a discussion of what constitutes significant scholarship in contemporary humanities studies.

Email your submissions to aegs.conference@gmail.com no later than December 1, 2011. Abstracts should be approximately 300 words. We also welcome proposals for pre-constituted panels. Include your name, institution, and course of study in the body of your email.