Violence surrounds us, sometimes visibly (in times of conflict and wars, directly or mediated through images), and sometimes invisibly, as part of a statistic. With the increasingly extremist rhetoric on parts of the US political spectrum, the so-called “culture wars,” violent hate crimes against LBTQ+ people have surged in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pacific-Asians and Asian-Americans were targeted because of xenophobia and conspiracy theories. Similarly, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were met with violent responses from authorities. Additionally, mass and school shootings hit an all-time high for two years in a row between 2021 and 2022. Violence, it seems, is part of America since its inception, the forceful appropriation of land and displacement of Native Americans, which also applies to other regions of the world, the expansionist histories of the British, French, Spanish, etc. Literature, from the very beginning, reflects these states of violence.

This conference encourages participants to think about these topics from the greatest range of perspectives possible and across disciplines such as literature, linguistics, languages, history, music, women’s & gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, biology, psychology, philosophy, etc.

Topics that papers might consider, but are not limited to:

• Violence and War
• Protest Movements, violent activism or violence against activism
• Violence through “Culture Wars”
• Psychological violence
• Violence in the American novel
• Violence against Queer communities
• Structural violence
• Representation of violence in the media landscape
• Racial violence
• Verbal violence
• Environmental violence
• Cultural violence, appropriation, notions of property and theft