Currency and Consumption: The Social Lives of Literary Texts
Eighth Annual Graduate Student Conference
Department of English
Saint Louis University, Madrid, Spain
21-22 May, 2010
(Submission 15 March, 2010)
slumadridconference@gmail.com

Keynote Speaker: Dr. James Buzard, Professor and Head of Literature Faculty at MIT.

Call for Papers:
Saint Louis University's Madrid Campus will host its eighth annual English Graduate Student Conference on Friday May 21 and Saturday May 22, 2010. The theme of this year's conference is "Currency and Consumption: The Social Lives of Literary Texts." While we welcome paper and panel proposals on any aspect of English literary studies, we would like to encourage proposals that explore practices of exchange and valuation within literary narratives and/or the cultures that produce and consume them. We hope to bring together papers that address a wide range concerns, whether they be material, ideological, social, economic, aesthetic, sexual, philosophical, artistic, political or racial.

*Possible topics might include but are not limited to:
-Intercultural Dialogue and Morphing Societies
-Gender and Cultural Consumption
-Poverty and Ethics
-Financial Crisis in Art and Literature
-Going Digital: Literature and Literary Studies in Digital Culture
-Gastronomic Literature and Literary Feasts
-Jane Austen and Popular Culture
-Film Adaptations of Literary Works
-Medieval Marketplaces and Marketing the Medieval
-Slavery, Prostitution and Carnal Consumption
-Travel Literature
-Foreign Ideas and Languages on the Shakespearean Stage
-Popular Fiction and the Marketplace

*Submissions*
Presentations will be 15 minutes in length. Submission of 300-word
proposal (abstract only; no full papers) along with short bios should
be sent to slumadridconference@gmail.com by 15 March, 2010.