Purdue Early Atlantic Reading Group Graduate Student Colloquium

10th Annual Purdue Early Atlantic Reading Group Graduate Student Colloquium
April 8-9, 2016

Theme: Transatlantic Circulation: Ideas out of Bounds

Purdue’s Early Atlantic Reading Group (EARG) invites graduate student scholars to participate in the tenth annual graduate student colloquium. Continuing in its tradition of widening the scholarly spectrum, this year’s colloquium will consider the circulation of ideas, trends, material objects, and texts across continents in the seventeenth, long eighteenth, and early to mid-nineteenth centuries. The conference theme aims to spark re-visions of the texts, images, objects, people, places, literatures, and languages of the early Atlantic world through inter- and multi-disciplinary scholarship. Proposals are welcome that employ a transatlantic, transnational, or other spatial lens, or that illuminate a particular North or South American, British, African, or Caribbean facet within these literary or historical frameworks.

The colloquium will take place from April 8-9, 2016. Dr. Melissa J. Homestead, Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will serve as our featured speaker. Dr. Homestead is known for numerous articles on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century American women writers such as Susanna Rowson, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Willa Cather, as well as four books including an edition of Sedgwick’s Clarence (1830) and American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 (2005). The keynote will be entitled: “Adventures in Transatlantic Circulation: Tracking Women Authors and their Books, the 1790s to the 1850s.”

We welcome individual papers, panels, and non-traditional presentations, such as pre-circulated papers, roundtables, or poster sessions. All disciplines are encouraged to participate.

We encourage paper and presentation topics including, but not limited to:

• Representations of Nature & the Natural World
• Constructions of Nationalism(s) & Creole Experience
• Discussions of Science, Medicine & Natural History
• Aesthetics and Literary Form
• Women’s Writing
• Native Writings
• Children’s Literature
• Reform writing
• Transoceanic/Terraqueous Studies
• Caribbean Literatures
• Cultural Studies
• Queer Theory
• Trans, Circum, & Cis Atlantic or Hemispheric Studies
• Print & Material Culture
• History of the Book
• Media Transformations & Visual Culture
• Modern Rhetorics
• Creative Interpretations (visual, prose, verse, etc.)

Please send abstracts of about 300 words by December 31, 2015 to the colloquium organizers at earg.purdue@gmail.com.
Panels will be finalized and participants notified by no later than January 31, 2016.