British Women Writers Conference
Hosted by The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
at The Heyman Center, Columbia University
June 25-27, 2015
Deadline: January 5, 2015
"Relations"
The British Women Writers Conference will engage the theme of “Relations” for its 23rd annual meeting to be held in New York City. The inspiration for this theme comes from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who taught at the Graduate Center from 1998-2009, and whose investment in relations continues to inspire new ways of looking at the richness and variance of (dis)connection. One of her last courses, “Reading Relations,” explored literary constructions and alternative understandings of relationality (the syllabus for the course can be seen at http://evekosofskysedgwick.net/teaching/reading-relations.html). Sedgwick’s interdisciplinary approach informs our conference’s investments. In this spirit, the conference organizers invite papers—as well as panel proposals—that focus on possible interpretations of and approaches to relationality across a broad spectrum of topics, methods, and disciplines. The committee welcomes investigations of interaction, exchange, correlation, or conjunction. Alternately, treatments might focus on relationality as a political, historical, global, social, personal, critical or textual phenomenon.
For paper proposals, please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio (in a single attachment) to bwwc2015@gmail.com by January 5, 2015. For full panel proposals, please compile all proposals, along with a brief rationale for the panel, into a single document. Papers and panels must address the theme and its application to British women’s writing of the long 18- or 19-centuries.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
Conceptual Relations:
- Influence (literary or otherwise)
- Subject-Object relations
- Human-Animal relations
- Human-Machine relations
- Darwinian relations
- Affect
- Connection
- Complementarity
- Synthesis
- Affiliation
- Collaboration
- Spatial arrangements/Bodies in space
- Communication
Personal Relations:
- Sexual relations/Intimate relations
- Interiority
- Domestic arrangements
- Care-giving, professional and personal
- Courtship/Marriage/Divorce
- Familial Relationships/Kinship
- Friendship
Global Relations:
- Cosmopolitanism
- Economic systems
- Trade
- Exploration
- Anthropological interactions
- Social/Political Relations:
- Social arrangements
- Class relations
- Labor relations
- Gender relations
- Community
- Political relationships
- Revolutionary relations
- Colonial relations
- Race relations
- Cross-national/cross-cultural relations
- Historical connections
Critical/Textual Relations:
- Theoretical approaches
- Hermeneutic relations
- Reader relations
- Biographical relationships
- Literary circles/networks
- Relations between literary forms/genres/traditions/conventions
- Palimpsests
Pedagogical Relations:
- Pedagogical approaches
- Text-Media relations
- Interdisciplinarity
- Adaptations