10th Annual Post45 Graduate Symposium

University of Michigan

March 14-15, 2025

Submission deadline: October 21, 2024

Call for Papers:

The departments of American Culture, Communication and Media, Digital Studies, and English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor are thrilled to host the 1oth annual Post45 Graduate Symposium on March 14-15, 2025.

The Post45 Graduate Symposium seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 media, arts, literature, digital platforms, politics, and culture. We welcome submissions that expand our conception of objects and meaning-making post-1945 or place them in comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frames. We especially welcome contributions that foreground the importance of race, gender, and sexuality to post-45 studies. Further, we invite (though do notrequire) engagements with our symposium roundtable topic of “Public(s)”: the make-up of interpretive communities; who or what constitutes “a” or “the” public; the state of the commons and/or undercommons; oppositional audiences and readings; conversations that move beyond and across traditional disciplinary bounds; public scholarship and public humanities; collective identities and collective action, etc.

Works-in-progress will only be limited by a length of 15 double-spaced pages; besides this, we welcome a wide range of submissions in both traditional and non-traditional forms, including conference papers, articles, dissertation chapter drafts, and/or creative-critical writing projects. Works-in-progress will be pre-circulated two weeks in advance of the conference date. This allows participants to consider submissions carefully and to generate thoughtful critical feedback—a benefit often absent in traditional conference formats. Each individual paper will also receive feedback from a faculty respondent and 30 minutes of discussion amongst all symposium participants. In addition to the paper workshops, the symposium will feature a keynote address and a roundtable discussion on the topic “What Is the Public(s)?”

If participants cannot secure adequate funding from their institutions, some financial support for travel will be allocated based on need. While this support will not fully fund all expenses for each participant, we plan to do everything we can to make the symposium accessible for those traveling nationally and internationally to Ann Arbor. 

Post45 is a collective of scholars working on literature and culture since 1945. The group was founded in 2006 and has met annually since to discuss diverse new work in the field. The Post45 Graduate Symposium meets annually to discuss works in progress. Now in its tenth year, the Grad Symposium has convened in the past at Concordia University and McGill University, University of Washington, Northwestern University, University of California Irvine, Rutgers University, Princeton University, Yale University, University of California Berkeley and Stanford University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Submissions:

Those interested should submit 250- to 300-word abstracts through the following Google Form by October 21.

Note: the form will collect your name, academic affiliation, paper title, and abstract. To facilitate the anonymized submission process, we ask that you fully blind your paper abstract before submission. Your abstract should not include your name or your institution’s name (including in the name of your uploaded file).