Conferences 2020

[merry night wanderer]

Since we're all checking this forum obsessively anyway - at least I am, and there's a good chance you are, if you're reading this - why don't we share plans for upcoming conferences? 

I won't be in town for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference, sadly, but I'm planning on submitting my writing sample (which ended up being on Shelley's Alastor and the intersections between its use of allegory with philosophy of mind) to the International Conference on Romanticism in St. Louis.

I'm also going to try to submit an older paper of mine, my favorite paper I wrote in my Master's degree, to the British Association of Decadence Studies at Cornell. It's about Arnold's conception of the critic, Pater's conception, and then Wilde's, and deals with how Wilde presented a vision for the critic-as-artist and the world to refine/create each other's identities in tandem.

I'm headed to AWP next month (the big writer's conference), and I'd also love to attend MLA - just as a participant, to see all the exciting things that are happening across fields. 

I'd love to hear about your plans and projects. 

[The Hoosier Oxonian]

I'm beyond thrilled to be giving my first conference presentation this spring (during my senior year of undergrad) at an international conference at the University of Cambridge. June 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of E. M. Forster, the subject of my senior thesis and most of my future research interests, and in early April Cambridge is hosting a three-day conference to commemorate and re-evaluate him. I was encouraged by one of my Oxford professors to submit a proposal for a seven-minute "lightning talk" (not a full paper, thank God - I'd die!) and was beyond amazed to be accepted. I'm incredibly excited to have an excuse to return to the UK for a week after living there all of junior year, but I'm frankly petrified about presenting at this conference - one of my POIs from Brown is the keynote speaker! But at the end of the day I bet it will just be a big Forster nerdfest and I will have a great time.

I also have a proposal awaiting a decision for a panel on gender and mid-century American poetry for a very low-stakes graduate conference at Purdue in March (if accepted, I'll be presenting on Adrienne Rich's revisions of Jean Cocteau). Hoping my panel is accepted to that so that I can work out some of my presentation nerves in a much lower-pressure setting there before I give the Cambridge presentation the next week!

[merry night wanderer]

I actually just got into Forster! Howard's End was a novel my aestheticism professor spoke highly of, so I plan to read that after I get through some of his short stories. 

[theburiedgirl815]

This is a great idea for a topic. 

I'll be making my second conference presentation for the American Conference for Irish Studies in Houston the first week of April. (I presented at the Southern Regional meeting last February so I'm finally getting a chance to present at the National meeting this year). I'll be presenting a chapter of my Master's thesis (assuming I complete it by then) ?. I'm not sure if anyone else on this forum is into Irish Studies, but if you'll be there, please come say hi!

[digital_lime]

I will be at the Northeast MLA conference this March presenting a paper. If anyone's going to be in Boston, maybe we'll find a way to say hello! 

[CanadianEnglish]

I'll be presenting a chapter of my Master's thesis this upcoming March at the CEA conference! This will be my second conference and the first where my paper is actually good (the first was a junior undergrad research paper that I presented last year which I look back and cringe over). 

[ArcaMajora]

Wonderful idea for a thread! Thanks for starting this

@digital_lime I'm also presenting in NeMLA this year! Let me know if you want to plan a meet-up or chat.

I'm also planning on going to the ALA this year. An abstract of mine just got accepted this morning. For anyone wanting to meet up in San Diego this coming May, I'm happy to talk.

Edited January 27, 2020 by ArcaMajora

[The Hoosier Oxonian]

12 hours ago, merry night wanderer said:

I actually just got into Forster! Howard's End was a novel my aestheticism professor spoke highly of, so I plan to read that after I get through some of his short stories. 

Always glad to claim another devotee for EMF's ranks! (I believe he is criminally underrated). Which short stories are you reading?

[WallaceShawn]

Going to the giant extravaganza that is SCMS in April in Colorado. My University, in its wisdom, can't find any travel money for me because I'm graduating at the end of this semester. Luckily I found a cheapish flight, but bureaucracy gets ya down sometimes. 

[digital_lime]

21 hours ago, ArcaMajora said:

Wonderful idea for a thread! Thanks for starting this

@digital_lime I'm also presenting in NeMLA this year! Let me know if you want to plan a meet-up or chat.

I'm also planning on going to the ALA this year. An abstract of mine just got accepted this morning. For anyone wanting to meet up in San Diego this coming May, I'm happy to talk.

Sounds great! I'd love to see your panel. If you'd like, send me a message and let me know when you're presenting! I'll be there for the entire conference.

[merry night wanderer]

To those more experience in the conference circuit, what parts of it did you find the most valuable? 

[merry night wanderer]

On 1/28/2020 at 12:31 AM, The Hoosier Oxonian said:

Always glad to claim another devotee for EMF's ranks! (I believe he is criminally underrated). Which short stories are you reading?

Just The Celestial Omnibus. The title story is such a didactic fable of literature, but, I mean, it's one I entirely agree with, so I love it. Forster just has so much humanity, for lack of a better word. I'm really looking forward to Howard's End given how my aestheticism professor described how it dovetailed some of the concerns of the art for art's sake movement. What's your paper on? (Also, what a cool format! I've seen that "lightning talk" idea in a few CFPs I've browsed through - it seems like an exciting, and potentially discussion-stirring, way of approaching things, rather than the "talk at the audience for 20 minutes, then Q&A" approach of most conference papers.)

[vondafkossum]

10 minutes ago, merry night wanderer said:

Just The Celestial Omnibus. The title story is such a didactic fable of literature, but, I mean, it's one I entirely agree with, so I love it. Forster just has so much humanity, for lack of a better word. I'm really looking forward to Howard's End given how my aestheticism professor described how it dovetailed some of the concerns of the art for art's sake movement.

I loooove Howards End (and Forster in general—I wanted to do my undergrad thesis on him but was discouraged from doing so, sadly). I’ve really enjoyed teaching HE in the past, and I even have an HE quote tattoo. I agree with @The Hoosier Oxonian in that Forster does get passed over a lot, especially in recent years. It’s a shame. 

[The Hoosier Oxonian]

1 hour ago, merry night wanderer said:

Just The Celestial Omnibus. The title story is such a didactic fable of literature, but, I mean, it's one I entirely agree with, so I love it. Forster just has so much humanity, for lack of a better word. I'm really looking forward to Howard's End given how my aestheticism professor described how it dovetailed some of the concerns of the art for art's sake movement. What's your paper on? (Also, what a cool format! I've seen that "lightning talk" idea in a few CFPs I've browsed through - it seems like an exciting, and potentially discussion-stirring, way of approaching things, rather than the "talk at the audience for 20 minutes, then Q&A" approach of most conference papers.)

Honestly, although I love EMF's short stories, most of them are strikingly weak in comparison with even his worst novels (the exception being a few of the more polished stories in the posthumous collection The Life to Come, which, like EMF's novel Maurice, was published, according to his wishes, only after his death due to homosexual content - EMF was "out" to his friends during his lifetime, but never to the public). I'm a weird Forsterian insofar as I don't actually love Howards End; I find it productively frustrating, but it doesn't delight me the way the rest of his novels do, especially the masterpiece that is A Passage to India. My "lightning talk" will present just a small snippet of my thesis. My thesis as a whole argues that rather than being torn apart by his competing commitments to humanism and to a queer view of identity (typically understood to be incompatible), EMF allows his humanist investments to enrich his view of queerness and ultimately envisions what is, in effect, a queer humanism. The bit I'll be presenting at Cambridge focuses mostly on a new reading of his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, that points toward this larger theme.

@vondafkossum, I've been flirting with the idea of getting an "only connect" tattoo for about five years now - maybe I should finally do it! Also, I'm curious: what rationale did your undergrad professor(s) give you for the discouragement about doing your thesis on EMF?

[vondafkossum]

5 hours ago, The Hoosier Oxonian said:

My thesis as a whole argues that rather than being torn apart by his competing commitments to humanism and to a queer view of identity (typically understood to be incompatible), EMF allows his humanist investments to enrich his view of queerness and ultimately envisions what is, in effect, a queer humanism.

That sounds super interesting! Are you planning to incorporate some of his later-life personal stuff, or will you mostly just work through the texts?

5 hours ago, The Hoosier Oxonian said:

I've been flirting with the idea of getting an "only connect" tattoo for about five years now - maybe I should finally do it! Also, I'm curious: what rationale did your undergrad professor(s) give you for the discouragement about doing your thesis on EMF?

I’m always going to encourage someone to get a tattoo. Go for it! Mine is from a description of Margaret near the beginning of the book (“Away she hurried,”). 

Alas, the thesis question has a boring answer: it’s because I couldn’t find anyone who worked or was interested in that period or area I wanted to focus on to be my advisor. I went to a state school with a semi-small English department (so much so I was genuinely shocked to see it pop up in someone’s signature on here as a place they’re doing their MA). I ended up doing my thesis on Graham Greene and his depiction and (ir)resolution of a collection of exilic conditions—and that was its own quagmire in terms of finding committee members to read it. I ended up with an Irish lit professor (my advisor), a post-colonial anti-Imperialist ex-pat professor, and an Americanist professor who was kind enough (and whose classes I had taken) to serve when asked. This was on top of having to get special permission to even do a thesis, as generally they’re reserved for students in the Honors college, of which I was not a member. The whole process of getting my thesis and committee approved was more stressful than doing the work, all told. 

[The Hoosier Oxonian]

On 1/30/2020 at 8:10 PM, vondafkossum said:

That sounds super interesting! Are you planning to incorporate some of his later-life personal stuff, or will you mostly just work through the texts?

For my undergrad thesis (which I wrote last semester), I had limited room, so I focused just on Where Angels Fear to Tread and Maurice. But I see this project eventually expanding to encompass EMF's entire oeuvre - that's the thrust of my SOP, actually. So the answer to your question is yes, and also yes.

It's too bad your thesis was such a stressful process (although doing a thesis on Graham Greene sounds exciting!) As an honors student, I was able to do mine through my university's Honors College, but when I started trying to arrange it I found out that no liberal arts student had actually done a senior thesis before (our Honors College was only created a couple of years ago) and there was no precedent for how it was supposed to go. I ended up basically having to do it as an independent study with just one advisor (a nineteenth-century Americanist who specializes in the Civil War). She's wonderful, but that was obviously not the ideal way to do a thesis!

Anyway, I've realized I seem to have hijacked this thread with ramblings about EMF - anyone have anything else exciting to share about conferences?

[ArcaMajora]

Just got accepted to Disjunctions! If anyone here has applied to that particular graduate conference, I'm happy to talk. I'd be happy to chat and hang out at Riverside.

It's surreal to be going back and presenting at my alma mater. Looking forward to seeing faces new and old. I'll be presenting on Reginald Shepherd and his self-portraits.

With that, I think that's my 2019-2020 conference plans wrapped up. I originally planned on NeMLA being my last conference for the year, but I lucked out on both Disjunctions and ALA taking place in SoCal.

Edited February 1, 2020 by ArcaMajora

[onerepublic96]

Currently trying to prepare an abstract for the Spatial Modernities postgrad symposium at University of York in May, as I feel like several chapters of my MA dissertation fit very nicely into the proposed theme/questions. Hard to really focus when I know my future in this field still hangs in the balance, so I'm finding I have to force myself to work whereas it usually comes more naturally and feels more exciting than right now. Anyone else with a similar problem?

[The Hoosier Oxonian]

On 1/27/2020 at 12:32 PM, The Hoosier Oxonian said:

I also have a proposal awaiting a decision for a panel on gender and mid-century American poetry for a very low-stakes graduate conference at Purdue in March (if accepted, I'll be presenting on Adrienne Rich's revisions of Jean Cocteau). Hoping my panel is accepted to that so that I can work out some of my presentation nerves in a much lower-pressure setting there before I give the Cambridge presentation the next week!

Just found out my panel was accepted!

[solana]

I've been accepted to present a section of my Master's thesis at the LASA conference. It's on representations of Dominican tourism in the Tentacle by Rita Indiana and Sirena Selena Mayra Santos-Febres. Has anyone attended LASA before?

[Bopie5]

I'm presenting on Jordan Peele's Us and Robert Eggers's The Witch at the national PCA/ACA conference in Philadelphia this April. Really looking forward to it!

[mobydickpic]

anyone else trying to go to ASECS this year?

Edited February 13, 2020 by mobydickpic

[WildeThing]

6 hours ago, Bopie5 said:

I'm presenting on Jordan Peele's Us and Robert Eggers's The Witch at the national PCA/ACA conference in Philadelphia this April. Really looking forward to it!

PCAs are a lot of fun! My first U.S. conference was the Midwest PCA and it was really nice change of pace from the stuffiness of some of the other conferences, and it’s just filled with fascinating pop-culture panels.

[Bopie5]

11 hours ago, WildeThing said:

PCAs are a lot of fun! My first U.S. conference was the Midwest PCA and it was really nice change of pace from the stuffiness of some of the other conferences, and it’s just filled with fascinating pop-culture panels.

Yes, I agree! I was at the Mid-Atlantic PCA this November and it was truly a blast. The energy is often so much more relaxed and upbeat. I went to panels on tiki bar culture, You on Netflix, disability in Marvel film, etc...truly a fun couple of days. 

[kolyagogolova]

I'm going to AWP & NeMLA in a double-header next week (haha murder me). Esp interested in panels to attend the last day of NeMLA (I'll be semi-trapped at a publication's booth in San Antonio). DM me if you'd like!