Stony Brook University  “Altered States” Conference CFP Deadline January 8

Stony Brook University

33rd Annual English Graduate Conference

February 25th-26th, 2021

 “Altered States” 

Keynote Speaker

Rebecca Krinke

Minnesota State University

As individuals and collective bodies, we are in the process of confronting “new normals”: a transformed world, a shifting sense of reality, an altered state. The experience of transition and change invites us to rethink, to better understand, how we conceptualize the states in which we live and the alterations that they undergo. While recent events have highlighted alterations to political and physical bodies, examining histories and representations of change and movement can help us to recontextualize and more fully comprehend transformations of minds, bodies, social and political norms, environments, and texts.

At this conference, we welcome presentations that consider how alterations open up possibilities and present challenges. How do transformations expose what we might previously have taken for granted? How do they bring to light new avenues for further change? Is it possible to move between states without altering them or being altered in the process? What contingencies, challenges, and possibilities does this kind of movement allow? Do we live in a continual state of flux or do forms of permanence exist? How are change and alteration represented in and through literary texts?

We invite abstracts for papers that explore states and changes in a variety of forms: alterations that are physical, psychic, spiritual, political, environmental, and social; and “states” that are natural, national, narrative, embodied, and linguistic.

Abstracts of 250-300 words should be submitted to stonybrookenglishgradcon@gmail.com by January 8, 2021. Presentation topics may include but are not limited to the following:

Mind and Body 

• Pharmaceuticals & Psychedelics
• Madness & Mental/Emotional Flux
• Gender Performance & Transitions
• Emotion & Feeling
• Body Modification/Art
• Crisis & Trauma
• Horror & Supernatural: Haunting, Possession, Werewolves, Shapeshifters

Politics 

• Memory & History
• Colonialism, Decolonialism, & Post-Colonialism
• Borders, Diaspora & Migration
• Nations & Nationhood
• War, Rebellion, & Revolution
• Resistance
• Heterotopias, Liminal Spaces, Temporary Autonomous Zones
• Norms & Normalization

Ecology 

• Mutations & Evolution
• Anthropocene & Anthropogenic Planetary Change
• Garbage & Waste

Performance 

• Speech Act Theory
• Casting & Performance
• Immersion & Transportation
• Acting & Role Playing

Texts 

• Video Games & VR
• Translation, Adaptation, & Remediation
• Language & Linguistic Change
• Challenging/Reinventing the Canon
• Narratives of Change & Conversion
• New Ways of Reading (theory, interdisciplinarity, etc).