The 6th Annual English Graduate Student Association’s Literary Conference
at The University of Texas at Arlington, April 5-6, 2018
“It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin
Recent years have borne witness to a barrage of natural disasters that have devastated communities worldwide. Furthermore, escalating civil unrest has interrupted daily life with human acts of violence. This onslaught of destruction in current events has raised myriad questions about how we respond to, and rise above, adversity. What does the future hold for a world overwhelmed by both nature and man? What, and how, can we learn from these experiences? How can progress overcome the surge of destructive forces? Can we avert certain disasters? Why do some marginalized people suffer disproportionately during disasters? How do individuals cope with, and move on from, trauma? What can we accomplish when we come together? This year’s conference seeks potential answers to these questions as a means of advancing the conversation and promoting healing and progress.
Seeking to attract interdisciplinary papers from across the academic landscape, we hope that presenters will interpret this theme as broadly as possible. We encourage contributors to submit proposals of up to 250 words for original work including, but not limited to:
- Collaborative art as a response to current, or past, (un)natural disasters
- Discussions of collaboration as resistance to violence and unrest
- Instances of “stormy” collaborative relationships, as either productive or destructive
- Collaboration, or “brainstorming,” as a mode of artistic production
- Representations of storms in literature, music, visual art, film and popular culture
- Cultural criticism or artistic interpretations of trauma or applications of trauma theory
- Considerations of disaster and the Anthropocene, ecocriticism, or posthumanism
Conference will be hosted by the English Graduate Student Association of UTA, in partnership with the English Department and the College of Liberal Arts, on April 5th-6th, 2018.
Proposals due by: January 15th, 2018.
Please submit 250 word abstracts to: DisUnityandDestructionEGSA2018@gmail.com