Graduate Student Conferences - UMD GEO Conference

Last semester we hosted a round table on attending and applying to conferences. If you attended, you know that one of the best ways to "break in" to the world of academic conferences is to apply to and attend graduate student conferences. We have already heard of some success stories from some of our M.A.s, and we want to spread that success. Another opportunity has landed on our desk - the University of Maryland's English Department is hosting its annual GEO Conference on March 3, 2012. Of course our own symposium is coming up this February and we thank all of you who submitted an abstract. But don't stop there! The deadline has been extended to January 30 for the GEO CFP. I attended this conference last spring and it was a rewarding experience. Whether you are just beginning to apply to conferences or if you have been to several already, this is a great professional development and networking opportunity. Good luck!
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GEO Conference CFP

The Graduate English Organization of the University of Maryland’s Department of English

invites graduate students to submit abstracts for our fifth annual interdisciplinary graduate

conference. The theme of this year’s conference is “The Body Electric.”

When Walt Whitman sang about the “body electric” he was thinking about a fantasy of

connectivity, a body at once charged and charging. Using the “body electric” as a focal point, this

conference hopes to highlight a broad spectrum of work from a variety of fields, literary and

otherwise. Abstracts that focus on studies of the body, connectivity, persuasion, electricity,

philosophy/philosophy of mind, morality, politics/the body politic, and affect theory are welcome

and encouraged. Similarly, “The Body Electric” may tap into discourses of historical and

emerging technologies—allowing us to think of writers like Whitman, Mary Shelley, Charles

Dickens, and Virginia Woolf as possessing a clear stake in the popular science of their respective

ages. “The Body Electric” creates connectivity and allows for an unbounded self—just as

Clarissa Dalloway “felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’…but everywhere.”

In considering the way language and literature tenuously work to bridge the gaps they often

create, the category of an electric body becomes useful in thinking of affect, rhetoric, social

change, mediation, enlightenment, subjectivity, and technology. For instance, thinking of social

movements in the journalistic commonplace of “electric” allows us to examine the currents of

communication that make them possible. Rhetorically, these currents of communication may

consider the bodies of work we create and shape; in doing so, one might explore the discourse of

writing as performance that provides a space to help (our students) develop a vital connection to

the delivery of texts; the “body electric” becomes a central consideration as we perform written,

spoken, and multimodal works. Likewise, thinking about the affective scene as implicitly electric

allows us to articulate a genealogy of the emotions.

In its broadest sense, “The Body Electric” lends itself to a number of opportunities for

interrogation. How do these connections happen? Does considering the body as electric allow for

reformulations of the relationship between the body and the mind? between populace and

politician? between society and morality? Do burgeoning social media technologies like Twitter

and Facebook extend or inhibit Whitman’s dream of expansive connectivity?

The conference committee invites proposals for fifteen-minute papers from a broad range of

disciplines and theoretical backgrounds. Presentations of creative work are also welcome. Panel

submissions (3-4 participants) are highly encouraged. Please limit individual abstracts to 300

words and panel abstracts to 500 words. Full papers may accompany abstracts. Please include

three keywords at the end of the abstract to assist panel formation.

The deadline for submissions is January 30th, 2011. Please send all proposals to

conference.geo@gmail.com.