classical studies

Writing Into the Profession:
Enacting and Exploring Roles of the English Scholar

September 25-26, 2009


For its fourth interdisciplinary conference in English studies, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's English Graduate Student Association asks, "What academic work are you engaged in?" This conference is designed to build a sense of community among graduate scholars by providing a forum to present ongoing research in a non-threatening and receptive academic environment. Additionally, this conference is designed to bring graduate scholars into contact with professionals who can answer questions about best practices.

States of Crisis
Friday, 9 October 2009
Brandeis University
Department of English and American Literature
Seventh Annual Graduate Conference

Since its origin in the ancient Greek krisis, "decision," related to krites, a judge, the term crisis has referred to ideas of discernment, evaluation, criticism, and sifting of evidence. In literary studies, for example, one can see moments of crisis in shifting aesthetics and changing genres as well as in literary tradition(s), character representation, and ideas of narrative. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches and scholarship, this conference will explore different responses to the idea of crisis in the humanities and social sciences.

This postgraduate conference will explore the rituals and ceremonies of literary commemoration from a variety of perspectives, and in various literary periods. Proposals are invited that examine how anniversaries contribute to the ways in which afterlives are remembered, sustained, and given their distinctive shapes.

Plenary Speaker: Professor Adam Piette (University of Sheffield)

Topics which may be covered include, but are not limited to:

1) The literature of celebration: ritual and ceremony, anniversary,
repetition and the cyclical event

2) The literature of commemoration: elegies, epitaphs, and posthumous
publications - our duties to the dead