Dear Graduate Students, We are very excited to announce the CFP for the inaugural Queens College English Graduate Conference, which will take place on Wednesday, April 9. Please find the CFP attached as a PDF and also pasted below. You can also find hard copies in the department office. This is a wonderful opportunity for you to share your work and participate in an important aspect of academic professional life. So do please consider submitting a paper proposal. And of course we ask that you save the date and hope you will all join us on April 9th. More details to follow, but please feel free to email us with any questions in the meantime. Best, Caroline and Andrea (on behalf of the Graduate Conference Committee) Andrea Walkden Assistant Professor of English Director of Graduate Studies, MA Program andrea.walkden@qc.cuny.edu<mailto:andrea.walkden@qc.cuny.edu> English Department Klapper Hall, Room 604 Queens College, CUNY ----- The Inaugural Queens College English Graduate Conference Call for Papers (CFP) - BEGIN AGAIN: RENEWAL, REPETITION, REFLECTION Conference Date - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 Keynote Speaker - Carrie Hintz, Associate Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College Submission Deadline - Saturday, March 1, 2014 The devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 has forced change upon the lives of many New Yorkers. The recession of the floods and fires led to a time of relocation for some and, for those who stayed, a time of rebuilding and renewal. The storm made us newly aware of the changing conditions of our lives, which force us repeatedly to adjust our expectations, and to reconsider and reevaluate our friendships, values, and relationship with our environment. These ever-changing conditions are reflected in the vast scope of literary production: from the Babylonian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh to the comic-book series The Walking Dead, new literary forms and concepts emerge as we reflect on how and why our lives change in order to redefine our ethics, identities, and cultures. By drawing attention to the conceptual and formal changes of literary modes of expression, we aim to open up a forum to explore how change has shaped our current understandings of society and the individual; to investigate what we have left behind, and why we begin again; and to consider how the conditions that shape our lives are always expressed in literature and culture. The inaugural Queens College English Graduate Conference is an exciting opportunity for QC graduate students to share their research interests. Historical as well as contemporary research is welcome. Submissions must be critical or theoretical works about literature or culture and can be pieces of larger works or works-in-progress. Suggested topics include but are not limited to: * Old worlds and new worlds * Utopia and dystopia * Origin stories * Genre experiments * Film adaptation * Comics and the graphic novel * Translation and transformation * Poetics of commemoration and change * Coming-of-age and rites of passage * Identities (racial, ethnic, national, gender, sexual) in times of social upheaval * Community building, social movements, and revolution * Literature and technology, or digital humanism * Interdisciplinary fields and theories, such as critical race theory, queer of color critique, disability studies, etc. Submission Guidelines and Instructions Please submit proposals of 250-300 words to QCEnglishMAconference@gmail.com<mailto:QCEnglishMAconference@gmail.com> by Saturday, March 1, 2014. All proposals should be pasted in the body of the email and should include your full name and current course of studies. All QC MA, MFA, and MSEd students, as well as undergraduate students taking graduate coursework in English, are eligible and welcome to apply. If you have any questions, please email QCEnglishMAconference@gmail.com<mailto:QCEnglishMAconference@gmail.com>. Keynote Speaker Biography Carrie Hintz is an associate professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College. Professor Hintz earned her PhD at the University of Toronto, and she currently teaches children's and young adult literature. Her research interests include women's writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on life writing (letters, diaries, auto/biography); women and nonconformity in Restoration England; spousal biography from the seventeenth century to the contemporary moment; utopian and dystopian writing; speculative and experimental fiction for children and young adults. She is the author of An Audience of One: Dorothy Osborne's Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652-1654 (University of Toronto Press, 2005) and the co-editor, with Elaine Ostry, of Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2003). She has recently co-edited, along with Kate Broad and Balaka Basu, Contemporary Dystopian Fiction: Brave New Teenagers (Routledge, 2013). From 2006 to 2010, Professor Hintz served as President of the Society for Utopian Studies, and she continues to write about the politics and aesthetics of speculative fiction for children and young adults.