Keynote Speaker: Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper

Conference Date: Friday, February 9, 2018 

Contact Email: peaksconference@gmail.com

As an interdisciplinary conference, PEAKS encourages and accepts research from a wide range of scholarly and creative disciplines such as literature, linguistics, rhetoric, education, creative writing, history, art history, musicology, women and gender studies, film studies, science, philosophy, psychology, communications, and much more! 

Dangerous Knowledge: 2018 PEAKS Interdisciplinary Conference at Northern Arizona University 

In the 1800s Maria Edgeworth noted the difficulty of constructing stories ‘suited to the early years of youth, and, at the same time, conformable to the complicate relations of modern society.’  Children of 2018, a ‘rising generation’ of remarkably sophisticated individuals, face a startling array of challenges.

What can cinema teach us about labor, in the past, the present or the future? From Workers Leaving the Factory (Louis and Auguste Lumière and Harun Farocki) to the question of automation; from protest and resistance to the rhythms of the workday on screen, cinema has been a laboratory and incubator for ideas about work, value, time, energy, and capital. While this diacritics special issue will focus on cinema, we may also consider work that engages with other screen media cultures as long as cinema remains a point of reference. Essays may focus on specific films, genres, styles; or they may look more broadly at critical theories or limitations of the filmic apparatus to engage labor. 

Contributions are sought for a prospective peer-reviewed cluster for Talisman on Poetics and Materialism.

The James Fenimore Cooper Society will host two panels at the 27th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, to be held in San Francisco, CA at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco from May 24-27th, 2018.

Panel 1: The Frontier in American Literary Imagination