Brandeis Novel Symposium

Call for Papers

Espionage, Empire and the Novel

Graham Greene’s The Quiet American

Friday October 22nd, 2021

Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

The fifth annual Brandeis Novel Symposium centers on the novel’s relationship to espionage and empire: this year’s featured text is Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955). The structure of the Brandeis Novel Symposium encourages explorations of broader theoretical, conceptual, and formal issues rather than exclusive focus on the central text. We welcome papers that situate The Quiet American in relation to a variety of topics: gender, orientalism, the ethics and aesthetics of alterity; espionage and the spy novel; empire, colonialism, Vietnam, American exceptionalism; “forever wars,” the war novel, the anti-war novel, the journalism novel; complicity, worldliness, voice, critique. 

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by June 1st, 2021 to Laura Green at la.green@northeastern.edu. Responses by July 1st, 2021.

Programs for previous years can be found at these links: 2020  20192018  2017