CALL FOR PAPERS

Annual Queens College English MA Conference

ALONE TOGETHER

Conference Date: March 10, 2025

Abstract Submission Deadlines:  Feb 8, 2025

The theme for this year’s annual Queens College English MA conference is inspired by Edwidge Danticat’s recent essay collection, We’re Alone. A reading by Danticat, sponsored by Writers at Queens, will be the culminating event for this year’s conference. In the introduction to the collection, Danticat notes the double-edged nature of her volume’s title, one that is repeated in the conference’s theme. On the one hand, “alone” suggests a condition of solitude, solitariness, or even abandonment. But the word “together” implies a state of collectivity, a communal sense of abandonment, and a group with whom one shares a sense of being dispossessed or left behind.  Reflecting on her title, Danticat writes: “We’re alone is the persistent chorus of the deserted, as in no one is coming to save us. Yet, we’re alone can also be a promise writers make to their readers, a reminder of this singular intimacy between us. At least we are alone together.”

We invite papers that think with and around these senses of solitude and solidarity. We welcome a range of critical and creative engagements with narratives of isolation, exile, and abandonment, as well as moments of unexpected connection, collective resilience, and intimacy. How do literature, film, and other cultural texts navigate the experience of being alone while forging communal bonds? How do writers, artists, and thinkers represent states of solitude as both a burden and a space of creative or political potential? Papers might examine topics such as migration, loss, trauma, and the ways in which communities form in response to shared experiences of exclusion. We are also interested in discussions of the role of literature as an intimate dialogue between writer and reader, a space where solitude transforms into shared meaning and where language itself becomes a bridge between aloneness and shared experience.

Possible submission topics include but are not limited to:

Narratives of Isolation

• Migration and Displacement
• Literature of Solitude
• Affects and Feelings
• Trauma and Loss

Collective Resistance

• Writing as Community
• Literature as Activism
• Networks of Care
• Censorship and Silence

Intimacy and Connection

• Reader-Writer Bonds
• Hybrid & Experimental Forms
• Memoir and Selfhood
• Bearing Witness

Bodies and Borders

• Gender and Exclusion
• Science and the Body
• Carceral Narratives
• Kinship Beyond Borders

To Submit a Proposal                                                       

Please send proposals of 250 words or less plus a short biography or CV to MAEnglish@qc.cuny.edu by February 8, 2025. Proposals should be pasted in the body of the email. Please include your full name and the name of your program and school. All Queens College MA, MFA, and MS Ed students are welcome to submit, as well as master’s students from other universities. If you have any questions, please email MAEnglish@qc.cuny.edu.  Please note that this conference is fully in-person. There is no registration fee required. It's free and open to the public.