Past Grad Conferences
PAST
CONFERENCES
Exhumations and the Revisiting of the Past
Fourth Annual
University of Ottawa English Department Graduate Conference
June 12th - 13th, 2009
What's dead
does not always stay buried, and what's buried is not
always dead. To exhume is to bring forth from the earth—to dredge
up,
to revivify, to resurrect. Issues of life and death abound, but is the
binary secure? Are there subterranean survivals? Can the dead walk the
earth? And what of the inanimate—can ruins be refurbished? Can
artifacts find new use? Can undercurrents become overtones? Can the
past be reconstructed as the present and telescoped into the future?
We seek papers answering these and other questions and welcome
submissions from students in all disciplines. Topics to address
include, but are not limited to:
- Exhumation
- Ancestors
- Religion
- Archaeology
- Paleontology
- Resurrection
- Tradition
- Regaining Memory
- Ossification
- Revivification
- Old Traditions in New Media
- The Subterranean
- Zombies and the Undead
- The Chthonic
- Secret Histories
- Reconstruction of the Past
- Fictionalization of the Past
- The Artifact
- Ruins
- Catacombs
- Paleoconservatism
- Historiographic Metafiction
SPECIAL NOTES
While Exhumations
is a graduate-oriented conference, the organizing
committee would like to put together an undergraduate panel. If you
know a promising undergraduate who might be interested in such an
opportunity, please pass this along.
Because
Exhumations is an interdisciplinary conference, we gladly
welcome submissions from students in any field.
Third
Annual University of Ottawa English Graduate Conference:
'Art Made Tongue-Tied By Authority': Expression, Suppression, and Censorship
September 21-22, 2007
According
to playwright Eugene O'Neill, "Censorship of anything, at any time,
in any place, on whatever pretence, has always been and always will be
the last resort of the boob and the bigot." Censorship continues
to be a major impediment to freedom of speech in literature, music, and
visual and other arts. Indeed, for every act of artistic expression there
seems to be an opposing act of artistic suppression.
Why have artistic works been censored throughout history, and why, in countries that pride themselves on freedom of speech like Canada and the U.S., do they continue to be? Have the reasons for censoring texts changed over history, or do they remain essentially the same? Who exactly are the "boob[s] and bigot[s]" that censor texts?Are there instances where O'Neill's characterization of the censor is too narrow-minded or even inappropriate? Are there cases where censorship is appropriate or justifiable? Can suppression act as an influence for creative expression or re-presentation?
Second
Annual University of Ottawa English Graduate Conference:
Propaganda and
its Discontents
September 22-23, 2006
Power, according to Michel
Foucault, is productive, simultaneously producing and produced by discourse. This
may, in fact, be one way of understanding propaganda: a discursive promotion of
the interests and agenda of an overarching or specific power regime. If, as Foucault
and many other theorists argue, power already resides in every discourse via language,
can propaganda only be seen as a site of expressive power? Or is there room for
a propaganda of resistance? From the state propaganda of Virgil's writings to
the pamphleteers of the Puritan Revolution to the Soviet cultural project to the
current 'War on Terror,' propaganda has long been an important motive and motivator
in the production of cultural texts. Likewise, culture has been equally integral
to the dissemination of propaganda. We would like to consider texts (film, music,
art, literature) as propaganda both for and against political, religious and social
power. How is power expressed in these texts? How does resistance make itself
heard? How do we re-read, recuperate and revise the propaganda of previous historical
periods? Is there an outside of propaganda? How do we evaluate propaganda - through
causes, motives, and effects, or is it possible to examine these texts as autonomous
aesthetic artifacts?
First
Annual University of Ottawa English Graduate Conference:
The Search Outside
the Text: Research Methodologies
September 23-24, 2005
In
today's interdisciplinary environment, literary and related research often involves
moving beyond traditional textual sources to include a diverse pool of secondary
material, including travel, film, online resources, and other tools. At the same
time, traditional research sources - archives, journals, and books - remain important
and are continually being adapted to modern environments such as databases and
other technologies. Every approach and field of literary scholarship raises methodological
challenges leading to interesting questions about the nature of graduate research.