Date: Friday, March 11, 2011
Location: Stony Brook Manhattan Campus, Midtown NYC

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Stanley Aronowitz – CUNY Graduate Center

Event Description:

Home to the longest-running graduate conference in the nation, the English Department at Stony Brook University invites scholars of all disciplines to submit papers to its 2011 Manhattan event.

At our inaugural Kansas State University Regional Graduate Student Conference in Literature, we will explore the ways in which revolutions of all kinds have affected (and continue to affect) our discipline. Revolution! is inspired by Jasbir Puar's groundbreaking work, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, which critiques contemporary configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity. Using Puar's work as a touchstone for revolutionary readings, our conference will examine representations of revolution in its various forms—cultural, political, textual, and theoretical—in British and American literature composed during any period.

In his controversial work Libidinal Economy (1974) Jean-Franҫois Lyotard famously remarked 'every political economy is libidinal'. With this radical pronouncement, Lyotard identified all hegemonic structures as susceptible to the affective ebb and flow of desire. Forming the cornerstone of the new 'libidinal materialism', Libidinal Economy, alongside Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972), saw the desiring body as inextricably bound up with economic, political and fiscal operations. In the decades that followed, a wealth of theoretical work drew on this challenging juxtaposition of the libidinal and the economic.

University of Portsmouth, Centre for Studies in Literature
Annual Postgraduate Symposium

Keynote Speaker: Professor James Walvin

17th June 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

Presently receiving and reviewing submissions for the Spring & Summer 2011 issue.

Authors are asked to examine meanings or perceptions of 'freedom' and/or 'speech' across the Worldwide Web that clash or align with conventional wisdom or common practices.

Possible themes, topics to be explored (in no way exhaustive):

1. How is the Worldwide Web used as a political, cultural, economic, military, or hegemonic tool to maintain free speech or curb it?

2. How does the Worldwide Web itself embody a political, cultural, military, economic, or hegemonic agenda?

3. What are the underlying, un-stated aims of those people or institutions that seek to limit the free market of ideas?

GOOD NEWS: Deadline has been extended to January 15, 2011.

Writing Democracy: A Rhetoric of (T)Here
Increasingly, humanities scholars and educators are attending to the local, the everyday, the public, and the “ordinary.” Trends like these in rhetoric and composition suggest the field has taken what Paula Matthieu has called “the public turn” (Tactics of Hope, 2005) and foreground the real-world implications of and applications for our work. Such trends also illuminate tensions and stark contrasts between constructs like public and private (Welch, Living Room, 2008), local and global (Gold, Rhetoric at the Margins, 2008), here and there, us and them (Duffy, Writing From These Roots, 2007).