The Drawn Map.
March 13-14, 2010
Northeastern University's
English Graduate Student Association
Call for Papers

Keynote Speaker:
Professor Martin Brückner,
University of Delaware

Faculty Speaker: Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University

& Professionalization Roundtable:
"Mapping the Archive"

The English Graduate Student Association of Northeastern University invites papers for this year's conference which explore maps and mappings in literature, theory, film and art. We might think of the discourse of literature as a spatial practice, working through global paradigms, transnational encounters, and charting the topographies and contours of cultural, textual, and scholarly exchange.

The concept of "The Drawn Map" implies a sense of historical geography and the tensions of the mapped page, the body, the archive, as they are recorded, drawn, and revised. Maps are surfaces which inscribe codes of understanding, knowledge and the architecture of power. They are also flexible cartographies, subject to change, erasure, and new demarcations. Maps impel exploration, travel, conquest, cosmopolitanism, curiosity, diaspora, migration and imagination. They are also scientific in their plan, graph, and measure. And finally, we might think of maps as articulations- the practice of identifying, naming, classifying and recording.

200-word abstracts may be sent to neuegsa@gmail.com by December 20. Please include your name and university affiliation.

Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to:

Cosmopolitan Geographies
Maps and Methodology
Imagined or Embodied Geographies
The Map as Text
Mapping the Field
Mapping Gender and Identity
Maps, Memoirs, Memory
Aesthetic Geographies
Formal and Informal Geographies
Circulation of Culture
Mapping the Classroom
Geopolitics and Geoliteracies
Mappings of Empire
Travel Narratives
New Maps, New Borderlands
The Economy of Maps
Archival Spaces
Mapping Bodies, Mapping Space