The Brain and the Body: the Love Affair of the Cognitive and the Corporeal
in Literature
GWU English Graduate Student Association Symposium
March 2025

Keynote Address by Dr. Evelyn Tribble

From medieval mystical texts to contemporary experimental novels, from early cinema to
digital narratives, the dynamic relationship between cognitive processes and embodied
experience has shaped literature, film, and media more generally. The George Washington
University’s English Graduate Student Association invites scholars to explore how textual,
visual, or musical productions negotiate, theorize, and reimagine the complex entanglements
between mind and body. We seek rigorous analyses that interrogate how media across
historical periods and cultural contexts mediate between mental and corporeal frameworks while
remaining attentive to questions of power, difference, and formal specificity.

How do literature, film, or other forms of media theorize the relationship between
cognitive processes and embodied experience? As writers and artists navigate the porous
boundaries between cognitive processes and corporeal knowledge, what epistemological and
aesthetic possibilities emerge? If embodied cognition fundamentally shapes cultural production,
how do different literary forms—from the novel’s sustained interiority to poetry’s material
instantiation of thought—negotiate the complex terrain between mind and matter? What are the
implications for literary criticism when we consider how marginalized bodies have historically
served as sites of contested knowledge production? How might attention to embodied difference
transform our understanding of narrative form, genre, and mediation?

The English Graduate Student Association of George Washington University invites
submissions from graduate students that engage with the relationship between the cognitive
and the corporeal as it is experienced within literature and diverse media. We invite scholarship
on topics that include, but are not limited to:
● Textual and Visual Representations of Consciousness
● Affect Theory in Literature and Cinema
● Performance and Textuality
● Medical Humanities and Literary Analysis
● Genre and Cognitive Frameworks
● Material Text Studies
● Historical Approaches to Mind-Body Relations
● Memory and the Body
● Disability, Debility, and Embodiment
● Absence, Loss, and the Disappearance of the Body or Mind
● Coloniality of Race and the Body
● Mental Cognitions of the Colonizer/Colonized
● Psychoanalysis and the Body
● Environmental Embodiment

● Power Dynamics between Cognitive and Bodily Functions
● Gendered Representations of the Body and the Mind

Please submit 300-500 word abstracts for fifteen-minute presentations to be shared virtually. All
submissions must include the title of the proposed paper and a short bio (100 words). Please
submit these by email to gwegsa@gmail.com by February 2nd with the subject line “2025
EGSA Symposium Submission.”