Harvard Romance Languages Grad Conference
Department of Romance Languages & Literatures
10th Annual Graduate Student Conference for Romance Languages and Literatures
April 23-24, 2021
Call for Papers
Looking to the Future:
Utopias and New Spaces
In these “unprecedented times,” visions of the future are becoming increasingly distant. The sense of what our world will look like in the coming years is changing daily. In addition to the notion of future and how people are changing their interactions with physical space, we can explore various spaces and relationships, including online locations and that of the digital link between humans. Furthermore, the repurposing of online spaces questions how we manage to belong when they are commoditized. Many things can bring people together including a call to action for a cause or a shared trauma endured. These questions are paramount in the study of literatures and languages as they relate directly to contemporary analysis and critique of literary and linguistic production.
In his book, Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz asserts that “The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” In addressing the limits of contemporary literature analysis as it relates to the conceptions of futurity in kinship and readership, Muñoz confronts the potentiality of the future across the disciplines of the postcolonial within the temporal. In this manner, we are influenced by what we read or are told by entities such as educational institutions and the government, and by what we experience and see, including cleaned up landscapes that erase historical vicissitudes in favor of homogeneity.
Through interdisciplinary means, this conference invites you to reflect on and discuss the questions of futurity and space in literature, market in relation to regulation and production of temporality as well as readership in text, the effects of language and translation in literature throughout the world, the decolonization of language and space, and the tradition of disciplinarily in literature and linguistic analysis. How is current trauma shaping our world? In what ways does the market affect social groups and spaces? What type of individuals makeup collectives that are successful in their endeavors of resistance?
How does pandemic shift along with social movements? Where do digital worlds reside and what regulates the relationships within and between them? Who belongs in public spaces and who does not when there is a lack of them? Finally, how do we navigate belonging within communities and spaces when we are faced with defamiliarization and an illusion of transparency?
We especially encourage but are not limited to approaches such as:
Transnational Studies Political and Sociocultural Spaces Linguistics
Gender and Queer Studies Body and Disabilities Studies Language Pedagogy
Languages and Literatures Contemporary and Social Media
Psychology and Psychoanalysis Historical and Environmental Studies
Proposal Submissions by Friday, January 29th 2021
To submit your proposal, please email the following to ubromance@gmail.com:
• 250-word abstract in English (Presentations cannot exceed 20 minutes)
• Indicate in which language you will present (English, Spanish, or French)
• Indicate what kind of technology you will need for your presentation, if any
• A short biography including your name, institutional affiliation, and research interests that you would like the moderator to read to introduce you.
Presentations may lead to publication in the SUNY Buffalo Romance Studies Journal
Please email ubromance@gmail.com with any questions or for more details.