EGSA Symposium Invitation and Schedule

Please join us on February 15 for the annual EGSA Symposium! This is one of our most important annual events, and your participation is key to its success. Please consider scheduling time to attend the panels, enjoy the department community, and support your fellow graduate students! We have a lot of exciting panels and paper topics, not to mention three wonderful keynote speakers: Dr. Gil Harris, Dr. Tony Lopez, and Dr. Daniel DeWispelare. Take a moment to RSVP so we can be sure to order enough refreshments (email Molly Lewis mclewis@gwu.edu or rsvp on Facebook).

Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities

February 15, 2013

Rome Hall 771

9:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

RSVP NOW!  to: mclewis@gwu.edu

panels:

9:10 – 10:10 am: Attitudes, Affects, & Alliences in Scholarship: A Round-Table

M. Bychowski, Patrick Henry, Sukshma Vadere, Tawnya Ravy, Leigha McReynolds

10:20 – 11:20 am: Dissecting the Gaze: Corporeality, Spectacle, and Performance in the Theater

M Bychowski, “Dark Bodies & Absent Parts”

Lubaaba Al-Azami, “‘What a goodly outside falsehood hath’: Identity and the Interfaith Encounter in The Merchant of Venice”

Sukshma Vedere, “‘Othering’ in the Mughal Court: The ‘Firang’ Physician and the White Mughal Emperor”

11:30 am – 12:30 pm: Spectral Encounters

William Quiterio: "The Uberpsycho as Alternative Historical Memory: A Consideration of the film My Bloody Valentine"

Erin Sheley:  "Faerie Hauntings in 'Christabel' and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'"

Haylie and Emily: "Herla's Haunting Hound: Spectral Intimacies in Walter Map's Tale of King Herla"

1:40 pm – 2:40 pm: “Exploration and Enlargement Make the World Smaller: On the Prospects of Transnational Encounter”

Lori Brister, “‘A little orange flag of ostentation’: Posters, Luggage Labels, and Tourism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

James Francis, “Fraud, Pleasure and Travail: Theatrical Economies of The Travels of the Three English Brothers”

Sreyoshi Sarkar, "Of Films and Therapy: The Lebanon War, the Holocaust and the Vietnam War in Waltz with Basheer"

2:50 – 3:50 pm: Nationalism, or Specters of Identity

Molly Lewis, “Racialized Time: Formulating the Medieval Jew through English Chrononormativity”

Patrick Henry, “Edgar Allan Poe, Curator of the American Identity:  Anxieties of Nationalism in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”

Nora Alfaiz, “The Patients ‘Etherized Upon a Table’: Societal Alienation of T.S. Eliot and Prufrock”

Maia Gil’Adi, “‘Erase the stains’: Racial Hauntings and the Browning of America in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One”

4:00 – 5:30 pm: Key Note Panel

Jonathan Gil Harris, “Hi Mho Jhi Kudd: Thomas Stevens'/Tomás Estêvão's/Pâtri Guru's Translated Body in Goa, 1616.”

Antonio Lopez, “On a Bus, in a Trunk: States of Transit and U.S. Latino Poetry.”

Daniel DeWispelare, “Of Sovereignty and Bondage, or, this translation which is not one.”

5:30-6:30 Wine and Cheese Party 

Symposium CFP 2013 Officially Here!

We are very excited to announce the third annual GW EGSA symposium entitled Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities that will take place on February 15, 2013. We look forward to seeing the wonderful submissions you all send in!

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EGSA Symposium 2013 CFP

Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities 

  

A Palimpsest of Street Posters in Puducherry, India

In his book Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that “[w]e need to

consider why we find anachronism productive.” And in this symposium on slippages

and slidings of time, place, space, and identity, we hope to explore just that. Despite our discipline’s best efforts to encode certain texts to specific temporalities and geographies, graduate students of GWU English recognize that figures and objects are not static relics of time, and any attempt to keep them as such will only result in failure. By embracing that Halberstamian failure, though, as a site of productivity, we hope to explore the possibilities that lie within those literary, historical, artistic anachronisms that remain dynamically in flux.

Thus, the GWU EGSA board is excited to announce our third annual symposium entitled Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities. We invite panels and papers that explore subject matter on race, space, nationality, identity, queerness, translation, transitional figures, ghosts, and all manner of things that cannot and will not remain still. Further, what do these failures tell us about space, place, identity, and time, and in what ways do they tell us? In this symposium, we hope to foster conversation between presenters and participants across concentrations and even disciplines through the intersections of current graduate student work to explore Chakrabarty’s suggestions as a question: what productivity will we find in exploring anachronism?

Panel Submission Guidelines

The GWU EGSA board will first be accepting panel submissions for our symposium, then individual panel organizers will be accepting paper abstracts. Panel submissions should be sent, along with your contact information, to Molly Lewis at mclewis@gwu.edu by 11:59 on October 26. Submissions must be 250 words or less and must be submitted as a Microsoft Word document or PDF.  Please include the words “EGSA Panel Submissions” in the subject line of your e-mail. Information on how to submit abstracts will be soon to follow.  

Don't get stuck with an empty plate. Please RSVP to the upcoming symposium

Your RSVP is not just helping the EGSA.  It's helping you too.  The EGSA will be providing lunch, and we will order food based on the number of RSVPs.  So if you are planning on coming (and planning on eating) please let us know through either our Facebook Group or by emailing me directly.

Bodies in Space - Schedule

EGSA Symposium Keynote Address

The EGSA Symposium, "Bodies in Space," is this Friday.  Put it in your calendars!  We have a full day of panels planned, with a keynote by Georgetown University's Dana Luciano.

Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU, 2007), which won the Modern Language Association’s First Book Prize in 2008. She is currently at work on a monograph exploring the erotics of the non-human in 19th century American literature, entitled Romancing the Inhuman: Animacy and Eros in America, 1840-1910, as well as a collection of essays on contemporary LGBT film and video entitled Once More, With Feeling: The Texture of the Past in Queer Period Films.

Dr. Luciano will be giving a talk titled "Touching Spirits" which explores the innovative intimate and social forms proposed by 19th century spirit photography, focusing primarily on the work of William Mumler (active c. 1862-1870s) and Edward Wyllie (active c. 1890s-1910).

Upcoming EGSA Events

EGSA would like to kick the week off with a reminder that the EGSA Symposium on Bodies in Space is coming up in just two weeks. In the next few days we will be posting the flyer for the event with all the event details, but please be sure to r.s.v.p. on Facebook so that we can order enough breakfast, lunch, and wine (yes, there will be wine). This is an annual event showcasing our colleagues' work and interesting scholarship, so please make plans to attend and support our department and your EGSA board.

Also coming up:
February 16 - "Summer Jobs for English Grads": a presentation on options available for the summer months for money and for the resume.
February 24 - Join the EGSA board for a trek to the Library of Congress where we will get library cards (an immensely helpful resource in graduate school), and possibly tour the main hall.
March (dates to be announced) - we will organize a "Plan your PhD" event, and cover skills such as Resume/CV writing and Publishing in Academia. Additionally, we are considering another M.A. portfolio presentation, and round-table sessions for the Qualifying and Fields exams.
April (dates to be announced) - we will wrap up the year with a blog series on Alternative Career Options, and we will host another book sale. We will also host elections for next year's board, so start thinking about if you would like to be on the ballot.

We will of course continue to publish CFPs and campus events. Please take a minute and subscribe via email to our blog (note: you may have to use a different browser if you experience difficulty with subscribing).

EGSA This Week

Apologies for the temporary absence of new posts, but please take a look at this week's EGSA events.

Please joins us this Friday, December 9th from 11 am to 2pm for the EGSA Book Sale! (Rome 753) All proceeds will go toward funding our EGSA Symposium in Spring 2012. Please take a look at our CFP for the Symposium and consider submitting your work.

Looking for something to read over break? Do you have a bunch of library books on your shelves because you can't afford to buy a copy? Do you already know what books you'll need for the spring semester? Come by the EGSA book sale and see if we have what you need! Our selection contains books from multiple disciplines and periods, including Norton editions, critical works, and anthologies. Prices range from $1 - $5.

Spread the word among your GWU peers. And if you teach or TA a class, consider making an announcement to your students or emailing them.

Also Friday December 9 we are getting together for the final EGSA Happy Hour of the year (4-6pm). We know it is a stressful time, so come blow off some steam with us over a few cocktails. Location is TBA (but it will be near campus) - so watch our Facebook Group and Fan Page for Updates.

EGSA Spring 2012 Symposium Call-for-Papers

The EGSA is happy to announce that we will be holding our second annual graduate symposium, Bodies in Space: Emerging Scholarship in Literary and Cultural Studies, on Feb. 10, 2012.  We welcome any graduate student work, from seminar papers to works in progress, and encourage everyone to submit an abstract and share their work with their peers from other concentrations.  This is also a great chance for those who haven't yet presented at a conference to get some practice before a very generous audience.  

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Call For Papers

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Call for Papers: Bodies in Space: Emerging Scholarship in Literary and Cultural Studies

[The Panopticon] is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one

another, of hierarchal organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the

instruments and modes of power ... – Michel Foucault

The English Graduate Student Association is pleased to announce the call for papers for our second

annual graduate student symposium Bodies in Space: Emerging Scholarship in Literary and Cultural

Studies to be held Friday, February 10, 2012.

Foucault’s reading of the production of docile bodies notwithstanding, the aim of this conference is not

to consider the ways that the multiplicity of concentrations in the fields of Literature and Cultural Studies

stand in relation to each other, but instead consider how they stand in relation with each other (and the

ways that these relationships are always promiscuous and overlapping). Thus, rather than an image of

a body pinned to a specific space, the title alludes to the many ways that bodies and spatiality might be

productively considered in literary criticism. More generally, we mean to provide a frame large enough

to encompass all of the interesting work going on in the GW English department. In this symposium, we

hope to foster conversation between presenters and participants across concentrations and even disciplines

through the intersections of current graduate student work. We welcome any and all submissions and

encourage submissions from previously written course work or works in progress, including dissertation

chapters and conference papers.

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts should be submitted, along with your contact information, to gwegsa@gmail.com by 11:59pm

on Tuesday, January 10, 2012. Submissions must be 250 words or less and must be submitted as a

Microsoft Word document or PDF. Please include 2-3 keywords at the bottom of your submission and

include the words “Conference Submission” in the subject line of your email. Conference presentations

will be approximately 15 minutes, and panels will be organized after submissions have been accepted.

We also welcome any volunteers who would like to be involved in the organizational / logistical side of

the symposium, be it chairing a panel or assisting with lunch.

EGSA Symposium

Just FYI, the EGSA Symposium has been moved from October 14 to February 10, 2012 to allow everyone the chance to participate on a panel.  Look for the CFP later in the semester.

- Peyton