The Arts & Humanities Graduate Student Association of the University of Texas at Dallas will hold its eleventh annual graduate symposium on February 22, 2020 at the UTD campus in Richardson, Texas. The RAW: Research, Art, and Writing Conference is organized by and for students and offers an opportunity for scholars to share their work and ideas with peers across the humanities disciplines.

As interdisciplinary scholars, what is our role in the representation of origins and legacies?

It is our human instinct to recount origin stories and memorialize the legacies of the important people, ideas, and events that shape our common experiences. As researchers, we contextualize, interpret, and teach their histories. As artists, we translate meaning and convey their significance. As writers, we record them for future generations while contemplating their motives and consequence.

As interdisciplinary scholars, we are constantly questioning the origins and legacies that inform history books, literature, museum exhibits, art galleries, public history sites, and other aspects of human culture. We seek to understand how they have shaped the past and present, while also recognizing the power they have to transform and inspire the future. Our holistic approach allows us the flexibility to contextualize their complexities and represent them in a variety of mediums and spaces.

This February, we invite you to showcase your representation of origins and legacies. Whether it be your research, artwork, or writing, we’d like to know how your work preserves, translates, and/or interprets the influential event(s), idea(s), or individual(s) that inspired it. Please submit a 200-word abstract proposal and 3-5 keywords that summarizes the research paper, artwork, or writing you would like to present. Be sure to tell us how your work applies to the origin and legacy theme and how it adds to prior scholarship in your field of study.

We welcome individual and panel proposals (3-4 presenters). If applying as a panel, please include a brief description of the general topic along with abstracts and keywords for all presenters in a single document.

If you are applying to present your personal artwork, please include an image for reference along with your abstract and keywords.

Please email your submission to ah.gsa@utdallas.edu by December 15th, 2019. Notification of acceptance will be provided by January 3rd, 2020.

General suggestions for presentation and panel topics include:

• Monuments and memorials in public space
• Material culture
• Holocaust museums
• The long civil rights movement
• Identifying and confronting genocide
• Avant-garde movements
• Origin stories in Sci-Fi movies and comic books
• Underrepresented or unacknowledged historical events/figures
• Reinterpreting history through art
• History and legacy of a musical style/instrument
• Creation myths
• Transitional justice initiatives
• Memorializing victories and tragedies