Update: This year's keynote speaker is Camille Owens. Owens is assistant professor of English at McGill University. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, ableism, and childhood in the nineteenth-century United States. Her book, Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (NYU Press, 2024), was 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and received an honourable mention from the MLA in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition.

"There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses." —Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

"The fact that we are here and that I speak not these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immbolizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken." —Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action."

Silence is a word of many meanings. As an adjective (silent), it denotes the absence of sound, in which conditions of sonic communication become impossible. As a verb (to silence), it evokes the deliberate suppression of a voice, opinion, or presence. Silence, then, is both a condition and an action. It is a phenomenon that signals absence, while simultaneously drawing attention to what is withheld, unsaid, or repressed.

Although it often escapes notice, silence is ubiquitous in literature. Pauses and gaps, isolation and incompleteness, and suppressions and secrets not only give meaningful context to speech and sound but also draw our attention to that which remains unknown and unexpressed. Likewise, in performance-based media, much can be discerned from the unsaid and from embodied forms of silence. As a poetic and rhetorical device, silence opens up interpretive space, exposing the emotional, cultural, or political contours of a narrative and the context in which it was created. Silence also carries distinct political weight: it can function as a tool of control, but also as a means of resistance or refusal. Indeed, the recent suppression of speech—particularly that of marginalized groups—has prompted urgent debates about freedom of expression, censorship, and the consequences of silence.

This conference invites interdisciplinary submissions that explore the complex dimensions of silence—its poetics, politics, and possibilities. Submissions might address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Narratives of silence and silencing
• Silence in cultural, political, and social discourses
• Forms of silence in literary and artistic texts
• Racial silencing and its resistances
• Silent bodies and the embodiment of silence
• Visual representations of sound, speech, and silence
• Trauma, grief, and mourning
• Performing silence and absence
• Archival silences and gaps in historical records
• Silence in poetic forms/erasure poetry
• Silence and time: delay, suspense, and deferral
• Soundworlds and soundscapes
• Silence and spirituality
• Sound studies and auditory culture
• d/Deafness, muteness, and disability

We welcome submissions from scholars across various fields, including literary, cultural, performance, and disability studies; communications; social and political philosophy; political science and political theory; and art history. Submissions from artists and practioners are also welcome. Abstracts (250-300 words) should be submitted here by January 7, 2025: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScvcNpSIRZzJwod52jdO1_GWaexM3O4.... The conference will take place in Montréal from March 27 to March 29, 2026.

Questions should be addressed to Noah Bendzsa (conference primary contact), at englishgradconferencemcgill [at] gmail [dot] com.