cfp.english.upenn.edu

University of Utah Humanities Symposium on Space and Place
University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah

Keynote Speaker: Julia Reinhard Lupton
Submission Deadline: December 1st, 2012

As the world becomes increasingly crowded, interconnected, interdependent, and altered by human activity, considerations of space and place become increasingly important. Space and place are vernacular concepts with a contested history in academic discourse: Yi-Fu Tuan, for example, associates space with movement and place with pause; by contrast, David Seaman argues that routine movements combine to form a “place-ballet” that generates a sense of place; and Edward Soja rejects the dichotomy of space and place to emphasize the lived experience of “thirdspace.” However we define space and place, we cannot consider form, identity, and community independent of these concepts.

The University of Utah Humanities Symposium on Space and Place invites papers that examine the production and transformation of space and place. Papers might explore the reciprocal effect of space and place on identity, on power structures and ideologies, on the disposition of bodies, or on conceptions of community, the commons, the public, and the private. Papers from a range of disciplines are welcome: anthropology, architecture, literature, sociology, etc.

The keynote address will be delivered by Julia Reinhard Lupton, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, with a joint appointment in Education. Her most recent scholarly books are Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago, 2011) and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago Press, 2005). Her newest project, entitled “Shakespeare by Design: Objects, Affordances, and Environments,” aims to use the visual, cognitive, and phenomenological resources of design theory to disclose the many points of creative contact between formal and vernacular acts of design on Shakespeare’s stage.

Possible paper topics include but are not limited to:
· Designed Spaces and Places
· Creative Space—Creative Writing on Space and Place
· Western Spaces and Places
· Native Places, Transnational Spaces
· Wired Places and Virtual Spaces
· Educational Space
· Sacred Space in Secular Place
· Gender, Sexuality, Space, and Place
· Border Spaces and Places
· Political Space
· Class, Space, and Place
· Legal and Juridical Productions of Space and Place
· Ethnic Space—Ethnicity and Space
· Urban/Rural Spaces and Places
· Wild/Wilderness Space
· Performance of Space and Place

Please submit abstracts of 300 words or less to ryan.siemers@utah.edu.

For creative writing submissions, in addition to an abstract relating the work to the conference theme, please reference several of your most recent publications.

The deadline for submissions is December 1st, 2012.