We are excited to announce that submissions for the GCLR graduate conference LANDSCAPE & GARDEN IN ART, LITERATURE, AND FILM are now open. The graduate conference will be held in person at UCSB on Saturday, May 27, 2023. 

We are currently accepting proposals from graduate students, postdoctoral, and emergent scholars from UCSB and other institutions who are interested in giving a 20-minute paper. Please send a title and abstract to gclr@complit.ucsb.edu with the subject line "Landscape & Garden" by March 3, 2022.

In addition, we will also be hosting an undergraduate panel with UCSB students, so please feel free to encourage any of  your undergraduate students to apply by March 3rd, 2022. 

See the topic call below:

“Landscape and Garden in Art, Literature, and Film”

As conversations around landscape and nature have become central topics in global discussions in film, art, and literature studies–at a time of ecological reckoning and social reframing–the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR) invites emergent and established scholars from a variety of disciplines to come together for a one-day conference.

Landscape and garden have produced a broad variety of often conflicting attitudes and narratives that frame our relations with what is considered natural, from romanticized notions of wilderness to the expansive opportunities of the urban landscape; from colonial dreams of exploitation and hegemony to the laborious process of decolonization; from the picturesque to the banal and the inhospitable landscapes of the global fringes.  

This conference aims to examine current and past practices to reframe our conversations about this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, the arts and filmic media. 

Paper Topics can include but are not limited to:

• Landscape as discourse

• The interaction of land, landscape, gardens and nature with capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy

• New representations, reframing, and the resistance of landscapes within extended media

• Explorations of narratives and ideologies embedded in landscapes and nature

• The affective qualities of landscape

• Agential examples of nature, gardens, wilderness and landscape

• Anthropocentric vs non-anthropocentric depictions of nature

• Materiality in nature

• Uncultivated (wilderness, natural) vs. cultivated earths (gardens, orchards, agriculture)

Best, 

Kate Saubestre

GCLR Student Coordinator