Call for Papers Home: The Space We Claim March 14-16, 2025

University of Ottawa, English Graduate Student Association 2025 Conference

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” - James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room.

“Home” in literature is a space of creation and negotiation, both a tangible space and an elusive concept. It can transcend architecture, as well as shape identity, belonging, and memory. Home can be immutable, inherited or created, at once abstract and concrete. Writers continuously grapple with the ways home both shapes and is shaped by the individual, community, and forces of history. It is often as much about what we seek as it is what we escape from, and it spreads across genres and modes, from the domestic, diasporic, nostalgic, and speculative.

The 2025 EGSA Conference Committee invites you to explore “home”; how does a text make a home? Does it shape the stories we tell about ourselves and others? How is it used as a microcosm for societal tensions, generational conflict, or the roles of gender, class, and power within the family structure? Is home really where the heart is?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Home and family dynamics
• Homelessness and literature
• The role of fantasy and idealized spaces
• Ecocriticism: home and the natural world
• The undoing of home: apocalyptic narratives
• Ephemerality: transience vs. permanence
• Home and the “other”: alienation and outsiders
• Home and ideology: politics, nationalism, patriotism

• Speculative and science fiction: real and imagined spaces
• Feminist perspectives: domesticity, gender roles, liberation

• Poetics of home: language, sound, atmosphere
• Home in post-colonial and diasporic literature
• Home as physical space: architecture, setting, symbolism
• Home as psychological space: memory, trauma, identity
• The uncanny: the “un-homely”
• Displacement, exile, migration

• Role of home in coming-of-age stories

We welcome submissions in both creative and academic forms, spanning literary and interdisciplinary fields. We are looking to create a vibrant platform for cross-disciplinary discussions. Our three-day conference will be held in-person, and presentations of 15-20 minutes are encouraged.

“I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the ear lobe.”
- Maya Angelou, Letter to my Daughter.

Please submit abstracts of 150-200 words and an author’s biography of no more than 50 words to uottawa.conference@gmail.com by February 12th, 2025. If you have any questions, please send them to uottawa.conference@gmail.com.