New Directions in Critical Theory Graduate Conference, 2019
Timely Transformations: Looking Backward, Moving Forward
The University of Arizona, Department of English
April 5-6 Tucson, Arizona
“The time is out of joint--O cursèd spite, / that ever I was born to set it right! /
Nay, come, let’s go together.”
—from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Nay, come, let’s go together.”
—from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
The graduate students of the University of Arizona’s Department of English invite proposals for the annual New Directions in Critical Theory Graduate Conference. Held every spring, New Directions is an interdisciplinary conference organized for and by graduate students as a way of drawing together scholars, artists, and activists across diverse disciplines.
This year’s conference, entitled “Timely Transformations: Looking Backward, Moving Forward,” invites papers and performances that explore change in all its forms, with a special focus on conceptualizing change as a form of progress or as a response to an urgent need. We hope that our conference will provide an occasion for emerging scholars to share their work, cultivating in the process insights into the transformative power of both individual intellectual endeavor and academic community.
Living in a world of both turbulent change and stubborn resistance to progress, we believe it is crucial to come together and consider new methods for engaging with this tension between the past and future. We hope that our conference will provide an inclusive model that welcomes not only traditional academic scholars from the humanities, but also scholars in other fields and non-traditional scholars, artists, and activists who would like to engage in a dialogue about moving forward while looking backward at the lessons of the past.
Possible topics for critical and creative presentations include but are not limited to:
ecology, environmental criticism, climate change, current events, trauma and recovery, nonhuman studies, affect theory, community resilience, collective resistance, activism, aesthetics, poetics, history, ethics, biopolitics, social media, digital humanities, print culture, representations in media and culture, borderlands and frontiers, pedagogy, (de)/(re)constructing identities and (dis)abilities, dystopia, utopia, economics, language, gender and sexuality, genre theory, temporality studies, intersectionality, mythologies and myth-making, ancient texts, folklore, national and transnational identities, religion and spirituality, prophetic speech in narrative and/or verse, purity and sin, space and place, rhetoric of resistance and transformation, semiotics/symbolism, translation(s), truth in nonfiction, visual culture and media.
Submission Guidelines
All proposals must be submitted by email to [email protected] by 11:59 MST on February 15, 2019. We will respond with decisions by late-February. Please use the following format for the subject line of your email: “Proposal [Last Name] [First Name]” (e.g., Proposal Christiansen Christopher). Please attach a single document in .DOC(X) format with the following information in the order listed below:Paper title; name; institutional affiliation; any degrees and granting institutions; email address; and phone number
Abstract of the content and rationale for the paper, 300-500 words (presentation time for papers is 20 minutes maximum)
Two to three-sentence scholarly biography of presenter, with personal pronouns indicated
Indicate any audio/visual needs or special accommodations
The Speakers
Dr. Patricia Fumerton
“Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: New Directions in Archiving English Broadside Ballads”
Patricia Fumerton is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director of UCSB’s English Broadside Ballad Archive, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu, which has to date mounted online, transcribed and recorded extant tunes for over 8,000 ballads printed pre-1700. In addition to having edited or co-edited six collections of essays on early modern broadside ballads and popular culture, she is the author of the monographs Moving Media, Tactical Publics: The English Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006) and Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, 1991).
Dr. Zach Hutchins
“‘The Family Order of Heaven’: Belinda Marden Pratt’s Apology for Polygamy.”
Zach Hutchins is Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University, where he teaches courses in transatlantic and early American literatures. His first book, Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England, was published in 2014 by Oxford University Press. Essays by Dr. Hutchins have been published in a number of edited collections and in journals such as Early American Literature, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Women's Studies, ESQ, and The New England Quarterly. He is also the editor of two volumes: Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act, a volume in Dartmouth College Press series Re-Mapping the Transnational, and The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697-1726, which was published this spring by the Pennsylvania State University Press. His current book project, a pre-history of the North American slave narrative, is undertaken with the support of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.