BOUNDARIES AND BORDERS

The Annual Undergraduate English Literature Conference at Seton Hall University
Friday, April 19th, 2024
Keynote Address by Dana Luciano (Rutgers University)

Literature has long attended to boundaries of space and time. Texts can carry traces of their original contexts, senses of specific localities, and even draw borders of imaginary “places” through their own formal construction. On the other hand, literature has the power to blur borders between concrete identities: the speculative space of writing can challenge our assumptions of gendered, racial, and cultural selfhoods—or even redefine what it means to be human at all. What separates us from each other, from animals, from objects? How do poetry, fiction, and drama prompt new considerations of these boundaries and borders? And of course boundaries figure in contemporary discourses of migration, refugees, and exclusionary political activity—all of which literature can reinforce or subvert.

We invite undergraduate papers that address these questions. Possible topics include literature’s role in political conflict and mobilization, identity construction and dissolution, ecological destruction and flourishing, and many more.

Our keynote will be by Dana Luciano, Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses in queer studies, environmental humanities, and nineteenth-century American literature. Publications include Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014), co-edited with Ivy G. Wilson; “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, co-edited with Mel Y. Chen (spring/summer 2015); and essays in American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and Reading the Anthropocene: Literary History in Geologic Times (Penn State University Press, 2017). She is currently at work on two monographs: How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth Century U.S., and Time and Again: The Affective Circuits of Spirit Photography.

Please submit an abstract of 300 words, including your name, school affiliation, and contact information, to Donovan Sherman at donovan.sherman@shu.edu by February 19th for consideration. Please contact Dr. Sherman with any questions or concerns.

For more about the Seton Hall English department, please visit our https://www.shu.edu/english/. Seton Hall University is located in South Orange, New Jersey, close to New York City and easily accessible by train, car, and bus.