UCLA Friends of English Southland Graduate Conference - Extended Deadline: April 1st

Los Angeles, CA | June 9-10

Keynote Speakers: Jessica Pressman (San Diego State University) & Yogita Goyal (UCLA)

What incites the resurgence of an old -ism under the banner of the “new”: new criticism, new historicism, new formalism, new materialism, new secularism, new Americanism? The recurrence of the “new” is itself an academic tradition of some standing, yet the relationship between the –ism and its newness is not just the announcement of a break, but a negotiation between return and departure, opposition and progression. Taken as a whole, critical tendencies and preoccupations begin to look less like radical ruptures and more like reinvestments in persistent questions. 

This year’s Friends of English Southland Graduate Conference welcomes investigation into literary and critical recursion. What are the roles of return, repetition, revision, and iteration in our discipline and its objects of inquiry? What might recursion produce, reveal, or negate? We ask participants to consider literature’s own repetitions and reiterations alongside our discipline’s recurrent concerns.

Southland invites proposals that consider these concepts as they might appear in a diverse array of fields, including but not limited to:

- book history and reading practices
- formalism and poetics
- ecocriticism
- critical race studies
- history and philosophy of science
- digital humanities
- critical theory
- visual culture and media studies
- disability studies
- "new" critical turns
- gender, queer, and sexuality studies
- pedagogy and education

Please send a 200-300 word abstract, full panel proposal, or rountable proposal to: criticalrecursions@gmail.com
by April 1st with your name, contact information, department, and institution.
Applicants will be notified by April 3rd. Please direct further questions to the same address. 

criticalrecursions.com