
Graduate Conference
About the Annual Graduate Conference
Each spring, the Comparative Literature M.A. and Ph.D. students organize a graduate conference that stands out for its distinctive keynote speakers and international contributors. Typically addressing topics related to interdisciplinarity, the conference continues to attract broad attention from students and scholars throughout the humanities, arts, and social sciences. In recent years, the conferences have been organized around an overarching theme "Literature, Politics, Aesthetics."
Current Conference
Past Conferences
2015
Sites of Decay, March 13-14, 2015
Decay calls upon a variety of meanings. It can be defined as decomposition over time, or as site of decomposed material; as the processional decrease in material magnitude; or as a displacement of organic power. Decay places and takes place. Decay may be erosion, both from outside and from within. Decay negotiates, monumentalizes, ossifies and ruins. The eroded sites invoke ludic aspects of decay's simultaneous presence and absence. Its discourse draws attention to spatio-temporal flux, and further renders discontinuities, creases and folds at decay's various sites. The discourse of decay centers in ideal conceptions of corporeal, aesthetic, political, and cultural sites. Decay can be manifest in death, disease, contamination, transgression. Ruins, monuments, bodies, borders, texts all serve as its locales.
2014
Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Jacques Rancière and the Politics of A-Disciplinarily,
March 28-29, 2014
Interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword across the humanities; the term usually
implies that scholars make use of the tools of another discipline while remaining
within the boundaries of their own. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière points
to the impossibility of this project, describing his work as "a-disciplinary" or "in-disciplinary."
We propose a conference about Rancière for three reasons: firstly, he takes up questions
and concepts that belong to multiple disciplines; secondly, his ideas have been adopted
within different disciplines; and lastly, Rancière himself theorized the nature of
disciplines and disciplinary boundaries.
2013
Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics: The Production of Knowledge and the Future of
the University, March 8-9, 2013
Neoliberal policies have restructured the university, disciplinary knowledge, and
the disciplines themselves. With the formation of the 'for-profit' university, profit-bearing
disciplines are valorized, student loans increase drastically, and humanities departments
are pressured to redefine themselves in the face of intrusive economic demands. But
where does this leave the humanities? What is the status of knowledge production given
economic deregulation and privatization shaping the present and future of the university?
2012
Forms of Life: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics, March 2-3, 2012
What comprises the matrix within which a given language has meaning? How is meaning
constructed and how is it operative across social, cultural, and linguistic impasses?
How is conflict and antagonism orchestrated both across and within disparate forms
of life? To interrogate the emergence of sense as well as the conflicts that arise
as a result of making sense, we welcome submissions that theorize the concerns outlined
above with a particular eye toward their theorization as forms of life. In this way,
we seek submissions that span disciplinary boundaries and topics, broadly speaking,
related to literature, linguistics, politics, alternative and utopian imaginaries,
aesthetics, and tactics of resistance.
2010
Sexuality Across the Disciplines, April 30, 2010
This interdisciplinary graduate conference seeks to consider the intersections between
literature and other humanities and social sciences fields, including anthropology,
sociology, philosophy, art history, history, and how these fields interpret, understand,
and/or engage issues of sexuality. The conference will be held in LT 1506 from 8:30
am to 2:00 pm. It will be followed by a roundtable discussion. Free and open to the
public.
2009
Inhabiting the Transnational, February 20, 2009
The Department of Comparative Literature presents a conference on "Inhabiting the
Transnational," Friday, February 20, in LT 1506 (9:00-12:30 p.m.) and in LT 1406A
(1:30-4:30 p.m.). For questions and program information please contact Gisela Brinker-Gabler
(gbrinker@binghamton.edu) or Annemarie Fischer (afische3@binghamton.edu). Free and
open to the public.