CFP: Stony Brook Grad Conference

24th Annual Stony Brook University English Department Graduate Conference:
“Instrument, Image, Ekphrasis: Intersecting Genres of Knowledge.”
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at Stony Brook University

Contact email:  SUNYSB.GradConf@gmail.com

Location: Stony Brook University, Manhattan Campus
Date: Saturday, February 25, 2012
Proposal Deadline: December 17, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Laura Kipnis

The Stony Brook Manhattan English Department Graduate Conference, the longest running interdisciplinary graduate student conference in the nation, welcomes papers and panels from all disciplines, including the arts, cultural studies, social and hard sciences, and the humanities. This year’s conference will feature a faculty-sponsored Best Paper Award; for details and registration visit www.stonybrook.edu/gradconf

Call for Papers:

The tools of a trade can enclose: a poem becomes its form, patients become their diagnoses, people their demographic, and students their grades. Complex ideas about history, foreignness, alienation, memory, subject and object are often distilled into a single image produced by our instruments of “knowledge.” The production of an instrument is ekphrastic: it blends genres and frames one genre within another: A paintbrush, x-ray or spreadsheet; a rubric, or questionnaire; a literary form – stream of consciousness, or fourteen lines towards a sonnet. Memory, artifact. Pen and ink. How do the instruments of a vocation establish a politics of communication? What do these images reveal, or obscure? When do they make us think, and when do they put an end to thinking?

The English Department at Stony Brook University is proud to offer an interdisciplinary call for papers that asks graduate scholars to reflect on the instruments of their discipline, and to think about how ekphrasis (ek as “out,” and phrasis as “speaking”) speaks out about the intersection of image, instrument, and genre. What is “instrumentality” in literature, or art, or philosophy? How is it the same, or different, in the social or hard sciences? Does it imply a certain mentality, or construct a static “reader”?

Abstracts can be up to 250 words, and should be submitted by Friday, December 17, 2011. Applicants will be notified of their acceptance shortly after the December deadline. Students interested in competing for the Best Paper Prize sponsored by Stony Brook English faculty must submit a completed paper no later than January 16, 2012 for consideration. Award winners will be announced at the conference. Email submissions to: SUNYSB.GradConf@gmail.com.

Paper and panel submission topics can address a broad range of interests. Diverse genre proposals are welcome, including music, art, science posters, social research, etc. Possible “instruments” are listed below:

Instruments of change: Migrations and Diasporas
Instruments of Memory: Cultural Memory, Testimonial Narratives, Memory and Written Record
Instruments of Place: Maps, regions, “Homelands” (real or imaginary)
Instrumentality, performance, and art (e.g. ekphrastic narratives)
Philosophy (e.g., debates over realism)
Rhetoric (e.g., the use of strategic reason in communication)
History (e.g., scientific instruments in the history of science)
Literature (e.g., literary devices, characters as instruments, Representations
of marginalized people as instruments, literary ekphrasis)
Art (e.g., the use of artistic tools or philosophical questions related to the use of art)
Image in popular media
Health science (i.e. the gaps between tools and the human subject).
Cultural texts
Linguistics and translation
Narrative: Myth, Borders, Storytelling
Visual/Performing Arts and Music; musical ekphrasis
Oral Traditions
Postmodernity and its narratives
Voice and reflexivity in oral and written texts
Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives
Conquest and Political Memory
Globalization and indigenous cultures
Notional Ekphrasis
Displacement Heritage
Technology, gaming, and social media; emerging technologies
Children’s Stories- Language, Authority and Silence