Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference 2024

Call for Papers: Strange Bedfellows

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows”

          - William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The “strange bedfellows” for whom Shakespeare coins the term in The Tempest find themselves in a position of unlikely proximity through a curious amalgam of superstition, misrecognition, and necessity. Trinculo’s decision to “shroud till the dregs of the storm be past” beneath Caliban’s cloak transforms the island’s floor into a makeshift bed which hosts a peculiar alliance between two characters who must resign their misgivings about monstrosity and supernatural torment to survive. This peculiar pairing emerges not through ties of marriage, desire, or familiarity which we might consider as common occasions for the creation of bedfellows, yet their impromptu, huddled intimacy suggests that unlikely ties may produce productive possibilities and fruitful innovations.

The goal of this eleventh Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference is to examine “strange bedfellows,” peculiar relationships, alliances, combinations, or circumstances that challenge existing modes of collaboration and their meaning.We invite papers from graduate students across the humanities that investigate connections across and between texts, authors, genres, and disciplines,mining these unlikelyencounters for their literal but also metaphorical, social, political, aesthetic, sexual, and environmental registers. Built into this notion of “strange” are questions of propriety and custom. What “borders” do we draw around certain historical periods, cultures, media, or fields, and what do these pairings elide or reproduce? How can we complicate or challenge the things (ideas, texts, authors?) that are often seen as "appropriate" or "productive" to pair together? What necessitates or inspires unlikely encounters, and what methods are best suited to intervene in these pairings or borders?

We encourage papers that investigate “strange bedfellows”and their attendant problems and possibilities alongside an engagement with related conceptslike affect, queerness, intimacy, revision, genre, and more. The conference seeks to open space for methods and modes of work which are typically considered outside the scope of publishable, conventional academic inquiries. In the spirit of this practice, we invite individual or collaborativeprojects which investigate interdisciplinary and creative modes of expression, as well as projects which challenge or rethink conventional modes of presenting arguments.  Strange bedfellows can be found in all corners of the humanities and we strongly encourage a wide breadth of participation from English to Theatre & Performance Studies to Anthropology.  We view “strange bedfellows”as an opportunity to more deeply explore how we produce connections, encounters, and intimacies between ourselves and our world.

Papers might engage the conference’s topic in many ways, including:

●      Sexual and/or romantic partnerships (marriage, affairs, monogamy, polygamy etc.)

●      Mixed or experimental genres (autofiction, autotheory, etc.)

●      The performance of hybridity, strangeness, unlikely encounters/relationships/pairings

●      “Odd couples” and “unlikely allies”

●      Humans and the natural world

●      Humans and technology

●      Social reproduction

●      Futurity, hope, or possibility (social reproduction, but also war/strange alliances)

●      Feelings of strangeness, intimacy, otherness

●      Archival work (revisiting, rereading, and constructing archives)

●      “Undisciplining” academic fields and methods of investigation

●      Bedfellows in the Anthropocene

●      Disability, corporeal couplings, the mind and body

●      Imperial, colonial intimacies

●      Time and chronicity

The eleventh Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference will be held in person on October 25, 2024 at Tufts University’s Medford Campus. Please send proposals to tuftsghc@gmail.com by July 1, 2024. In your proposal, include a title, brief abstract of no more than 300 words, and a short biography including your university and department affiliation. Please reach out if you have any questions.