graduate conferences

The Hemlow Prize in Burney Studies 

The Burney Society invites submissions for the Hemlow Prize in Burney Studies, named in honour of the late Joyce Hemlow, Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University, whose biography of Frances Burney and edition of her journals and letters are among the foundational works of eighteenth-century literary scholarship.

The Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI) at the University of Illinois at Chicago invites proposals from professional-level and graduate student digital humanists for the Fall 2020 Virtual Workshop:. This workshop will be presented using a hybrid model and will include asynchronous video tutorials and a synchronous presentation and discussion. We invite proposals from various disciplines including but not limited to history, music, anthropology, literature, communication, earth and environmental studies, etc.

Call for Participants: CLOSURE Interdisciplinary Autumn Online School (CIAOS) »Graphic Knowledge: Comics, Research, Communication« (University of Kiel, Germany, 12-14 October 2020)

What can comics know? At the CLOSURE Interdisciplinary Autumn Online School (CIAOS), we would like to explore forms of knowledge encoded in text and image, in panels and sequences, and in cartoons and symbols. Together with the participants, we will explore how the complex medium of comics represents and negotiates individual and collective knowledge, semiotics and social relationships, and performs and re-informs knowledge.

The proposed interdisciplinary panel examines the rich relationship of music and the literary works within various European literatures focusing primarily on the period from mid-nineteenth to the twentieth century, but presentations within a broader time frame will also be considered. We invite a wide range of papers investigating the author’s technique of representing music in literature, examining aesthetic, historical and cultural interactions between music and literature, audience and performers, as well as the relationship between the author and the composer, in real or fictional form.

As we progress deeper and deeper into an age of data abundance, as what Simon Rogers describes a phenomenon of a “time in which we are all surrounded by data” with continued access to it, we are at the heart of a process of self-digitization, datafication, and online existence. Our move into cyberspaces and our dependence on digital platforms for information, communication, congregation, and self-design necessitate the crucial intervention of the Humanities as a discipline and a human-centered approach to understand what it means to be human in the digital age.

Whiteness is often described as too hard to see, like a fish noticing it swims in water.

Apocalyptic literature and its study have typically centered around notions of Christian eschatology, i.e. the judgement presented in the Book of Revelations. However, the aftermath of the second world war helped reshape our notions of this genre. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has begun to examine the relations between humans and the Earth during the Anthropocene. Images of global thermonuclear war, fears of communism, and a burgeoning climate change (with its subsequent and constituent crises) have eclipsed the teleological notions of divine creation and its eventual, inexorable movement towards eschatology.

Sponsored and funded by the American Humor Studies Association, this program is designed to provide individualized attention and support for emerging scholars who would like to submit an article on humor/comedy studies for publication. Graduate students and those who earned their Ph.D.s in 2020 are welcome to apply.

Ever since Charles Taylor (A Secular Age) and Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular) questioned the supremacy of secularization, scholars in the fields of philosophy, sociology, and anthropology have used post-secularism to analyze gender, state violence, religion, pain, the senses, and more. This perspective has helped us to consider how secularization has been accepted as normative and inevitable, and how it functions as a disciplinary apparatus or as a constructed ideology.

This collaborative, seminar-style panel invites an exploration of aesthetic interventions that respond to urgent concerns of contemporary migration. By analyzing the ways in which literature and the visual, performing, and conceptual arts engage with these issues, the panel interrogates how the humanities respond to the lexical and affective demands posed by the contemporary moment. How have our vocabularies as humanists been altered by discourses around migratory movements? In what ways can humanistic thought reframe ideas of rights, citizenship, sovereignty, and borders in light of present-day crises?

We tend to look at medicine and the arts & humanities as two separate entities unaware that they are similar. Medicine is affiliated with rationality while the arts & humanities are affiliated with emotions. As a result, a number of gaps exist between Medicine and Literature that need to be closed. In this session, I would like to expand upon the practice of storytelling in Healthcare settings and the ways in which it allows for a more patient-centered approach. I would also like to examine our roles as literature, language, and creative writing scholars in bridging the gaps between the two disciplines, attempting to improve the mental health of healthcare professionals through the act of writing, and contributing to a better healthcare system.

Caused Selves: Embodying the Material World in the Middle Ages

Julie Orlemanski (University of Chicago), Seminar Leader

Humans navigate personal and social relationships in the world through self-definition. Human nature is a capacious concept; one that has been challenged by diverse cultural revolutions in history. Today, as we stand at the crossroads of the human and the digital, technologies force us to reflect on how we view, create, and alter our selves through multiple media. As we enter the age of new media, and algorithms, the interpretations, perceptions, and representations of the self are continuously altered, while our identities become more fragile multiple and fluid.