Rutgers French Graduate Student Association Symposium
French Graduate Student Association Symposium on
Ghost: Haunting Presence and Absence in Works of Art
10 April 2025
Rutgers University French Graduate Student Organization invites scholars, and theorists from all disciplines to discuss how ghosts manifest across different art forms and serve as metaphors for personal and collective histories, resisting historical amnesia, trauma, and cultural forgetting.
Il ne se manifeste plus, mais je le sens près de moi, m’épiant, me regardant, me pénétrant, me dominant et plus redoutable, en se cachant ainsi, que s’il signalait par des phénomènes surnaturels sa présence invisible et constante. J’ai dormi, pourtant.”
– Le Horla, Guy de Maupassant
Ghosts have haunted human awareness for millennia. From pre-history to the present, the spectral figure has persisted, despite efforts especially during the Enlightenment era-to rationalize and suppress its presence. Yet, as Jacques Derrida notes in Spectres de Marx, “The ghost is the name for the thing that cannot be seen, that cannot be touched, but that insists and returns.” They have returned and taken up the different forms.
It can be a train as a symbol of industrialization’s dehumanizing forces we see in Émile Zola’s La bête humaine, It can also be migrants who transcend borders despite their efforts to assimilate into the new society, and who become figures of fear there on account of the cultural and religious marks carried on their body. Meanwhile, some individuals due to physical disfigurement-are chased away because they do not fit the definition of the perfect “human body”.
The ghost also haunts across time. Past events knock on the door of the present in powerful and unsettling ways. The ghost, either known or unknown, cannot be suppressed, it becomes a force of resistance, challenging dominant narratives and offering voices that resist erasure.
Keynote Speaker:
SAMIR HADDAD
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Fordham University, New York.
We accept the abstracts that engage with these themes and more, as we seek to understand the spectral forces which shape the artistic imagination.
The last date for abstract submission is 20 March 2025.
Please send your abstract to the email address: sk2648scarletmail.rutgers.edu
- an abstract and title of approximately 250 words
- 5-9 keywords
- a brief biography of no more than 150 words (per individual, in the case of group panel or creative work submissions)
- contact/personal information, including name, institution, program, level of study, and email
Topics (not limited to):
- Post-colonialism
- Colonialism and De-colonialism
- Slavery
- Gender and Sexuality Trauma
- Violence and Memory Studies
- Posthumanism
- Disability Studies
- Industrialization and Urbanization
- Migration
- Religious Studies
- Animal Studies
- Hauntology
- Childhood Studies