Thank yous: The Conference Committee would like to thank the following people for their support: All of our visiting panellists (both student and faculty), our volunteers (including our moderators and respondents), Walter Benn Michaels, Dr. Chris Douglas, the Landsdowne Fund, the English Department, the Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Graduate Studies, and Sandy Garnett. Thank you for making this year's conference a success!
Your conference committee this year was: Caley Ehnes, Adam Robinson, Kate Wellburn, Dr. John Tucker, and Dr. Gordon Fulton.
Some of the presented papers are now posted. They can be found in the
Abstracts and Bios page under their author, or on the
the program page by clicking on the presenter's name.
Call for Papers
The University of Victoria’s 7th Annual English Graduate Students Conference invites proposals for this year’s conference, entitled “Identity Works: Order and Diversity in Literary Studies,” to be held at the University of Victoria from March 3rd to 4th, 2006.
What does it mean to talk about identity in literature and literary studies? This year’s conference attempts to interrogate constructions, definitions, categories, and fictions of identity as they are used in literary studies.
How does identity cope with order and/or diversity? How does identity imagine notions of multiplicity? To what extent does identity rely on exclusion: can identity be realized in a pluralistic society? We hope to stimulate a discussion that challenges understandings of identity, and creates a space to elaborate and explore questions of identity as they arise in literary studies and in the world around us.
We encourage submissions that consider identity within a diverse range of literary texts, as well as papers concerned with theoretical implications of identity. Specifications for submission: 200-400 word proposals for twenty minute papers, with a 50 word abstract to be included in the conference program.
Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to:
- How can discourses of identity in literature and literary studies impact on broader social and political struggles?
- In what ways are we constrained/confined by identity?
- How does the language of identity interact with our notions of discrimination?
- Can one distinguish ethical from unethical uses of identity?
- What is the function of identity a pluralistic society?
- How has “Americanization” affected Canadian identity?
- Does identity presuppose unity?
- How is identity formed/accumulated/acquired?
- How is identity influenced by technology?
- How can discourses of gender re-imagine identity?
- How can minority discourses of identity challenge a hegemonic vision?
Keynote speaker Walter Benn Michaels will be delivering two papers that focus on the integration of identity, race and class and the tensions therein. His discussion evolves from a larger and ongoing argument developed most recently in “Shape of the Signifier” (2004), that liberalism and conservatism are both committed to the language of identity in the U.S. (perhaps more extensively than elsewhere).
Please attach a separate cover letter with name, address, telephone number, email address and affiliated institutions. Deadline for proposals is January 16, 2006. Send completed abstracts to Caley Ehnes, Conference Manager: cehnes@uvic.ca.