Webs of Wonder
37th Annual English Graduate Conference
February 28, 2025

Keynote Speaker:
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
University at Buffalo

Where and how does one experience wonder? At the Met Cloisters, the twelve-foot tall tapestry, The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, elicits wonder from afar. The textile’s marvelous content, observable and laborious process of creation, and its relation to its physical environment all invite encounters with wonder. Since Greek antiquity, wonder has been concerned with developments of knowledge and artistic production; associated with philosophical traditions of teaching, learning and writing; applied to objects and treasures; linked to response and affect; and depicted as curiosity, awe, uncertainty, astonishment, disgust and horror.

If wonder can be object and response within a larger network of knowledge production, how do objects of wonder fit into networks or webs of the wondrous? In Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park write, “the early modern culture of wonders, serv[es] as the nodes of a thickly cross-hatched network of commerce, correspondence, and tourism” (265). Virginia Woolf envisioned wonder as natural and material: “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” These frameworks of wonder are both present in the tapestry; its vibrant intricacies are developed from a single thread into a complete scene, exemplifying the endless ways in which wonder is process, affect and object.

The Latin root of text comes from textus, meaning “style, tissue of a literary work, lit. that which is woven, web, texture.” Again, this metaphor connects writing, thinking, and teaching to a material, physical act, or object. Further traces of this idea can be found in disparate topics such as Indigenous spirituality, Greek mythology, and literary criticism. The spider’s web, the World Wide Web, and theories of intertextuality help visualize the often-invisible systems of creation that produce wonder.

This conference welcomes projects that engage with conceptions of webs and wonder, including interdisciplinary studies of networks, matrices, and patterns across media. Other projects may cover mobility and movement (environmental, national, physical, virtual reality – who and what can be moved) or historical studies of and/or representations of urban development and migration. Additionally, wonder as a cognitive or emotional response and wonder as physical and tangible objects of connectivity are also appreciated. We further invite studies of genre/style, sequels/prequels, disciplines/fields, and/or canons, the life of a text or object/circulation of knowledge, work on the archive, the whisper network, or #MeToo movement.
 
Presentations may include but are not limited to the following fields and topics:

- Cultural representations of webs or wonder in literature, theatre, visual art, film, television, music, fashion or performance art
- Digital Humanities
- Cinema and Media Studies
- Art History
- Transmedia Studies
- Data/Surveillance Studies
- Philosophy
- Theology
- Colonial & Postcolonial Studies
- Indigenous Studies
- Affect Theory
- History of Emotions
- Phenomenology
- Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
- Performance Studies
- Ecocriticism
- Animal Studies
- Labor Studies
- Diaspora, Migration Studies
- Disability Studies / Medical Humanities
 
Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to stonybrookenglishgradcon@gmail.com by January 15, 2025.