Graduate Colloquium

The Boston College English colloquium is an annual gathering of faculty and graduate candidates to share their latest research. Our goal is to foster a community of learning by finding connections across work done for classes or towards publication. The colloquium features research in the English Department as well as interdisciplinary research from other humanities departments here at Boston College. We welcome you to participate in an evening of intellectual reflection and community. In future years, the colloquium may be opened to faculty and graduates from Boston-area colleges and universities.

English Department Colloquium Spring 2023 Call For Papers

Orientations: Situating Our Bodies in Space and Time

“The starting point for orientation is the point from which the world unfolds: the here of the body and the where of its dwelling.”


Sara Ahmed’s approach towards orientations offers a springboard for the theme of our conference. Our colloquium will question how different embodied identities influence the individual’s ability to inhabit space. The body— as an individual or part of a community— orientates itself as a subjective response to the space and time it occupies. Our goal is to examine how different embodied orientations show the multi-faceted, and often contradictory, ways a body inhabits a specific time and space using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches. 

We invite you all to consider how different literary frameworks position us to consider how space influences our subjective lived experiences. How does the body inhabit various geographies across different literary genres or historical periods? How does space operate as a container? How does diaspora or migration influence our orientation towards space? How do textual conceptions of space generate or break down spatial or temporal frames for literary bodies? 

Submissions for paper presentations should be approximately 15 minutes in length and in the form of an abstract as a PDF/Word Document that interrogates any aspect of the theme in our title. Subjects may include, but are not limited to:

Human Geography

Dis/ability studies

Gender studies

Diaspora studies

 

Critical Race Theory

Queer Theory

Comparative literature

etc.

 

Submissions Due

December 31, 2022

Email Submissions To

englcolloquium-ggroup@bc.edu

Colloquium Date

March 23, 2022