Call for Papers: “Ebb and Flow: Reading Time in English Studies”

The Graduate Students in the Department of English at the University of Idaho invite submissions for a conference focusing on interdisciplinary considerations of time in texts and within the academy. 

The conference will take place on Saturday, April 9, 2016, on campus in Moscow, Idaho.

The University of Idaho Graduate English Conference invites proposals for papers on the theme “Ebb and Flow: Reading Time in English Studies.” UIGEC welcomes proposals from current graduate students working in any aspect of English studies, including literature, rhetoric and composition, linguistics, and creative writing.  Inspired by the rich and shifting relationship between time, literature, and the humanities, this conference seeks to explore new and revitalized ways of conceptualizing time in texts and within the field of English studies.
As graduate students, we are exposed to a large number of ideas that have been processed through our disciplines and offered as established foundations.  Time and temporality profoundly shape the function of classrooms and creative practices. Consider the labels that categorize our relationship with time, such as Anthropocene, apocalypse, millennials, and the proliferation of prefixes like neo- or post-.  As we see it, our entire relationship with time is up for reconsideration.

Proposals may address any variation on the conference theme.  Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How might we re-examine familiar texts or institutional ideas about time in light of current thought, scholarship, or experience?
• How can we reconsider conceptions of time, history, and temporality within texts and within our discipline?
• How have conceptions of time and history from other disciplines informed studies of literature, rhetoric and composition, linguistics, and creative writing? 
• How have literary texts, especially those that foreground issues related to time, informed other disciplines?
• How do you use time as a creative writer or visual artist?
• How have conceptions of time and history informed composition pedagogy?
• How does time function in your classroom practices?
• How does the changing temporal distance from a text or event impact teaching?
• How does your work address contemporary challenges outside of and within the academy?
• How have recent conversations on environmental scholarship and geological timescales impacted your reading of texts and time?

Please email a 250-word abstract with title, institutional affiliation, and contact information to Jake McGinnis or Jennifer Steere, University of Idaho, uigec@uidaho.edu, by January 15, 2016. Further information on deadlines and events can be found on our Facebook site: www.facebook.com/uigec.