Contact, Contagion, and Containment

CFP: “Contact, Contagion, and Containment”
Cornell University, March 4-5, 2005
Keynote speaker: Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota

Cornell English Department’s Graduate Student Annual Spring Conference is currently accepting abstracts for its fourth annual conference on literary, cultural, and theoretical notions of contagion and containment.  To us, these terms suggest different attitudes toward bringing disparate or divergent things together, the putting-into-contact of the dissimilar.  We seek submissions for papers of no more than 15-20 mins duration which will engage with some aspect of these themes, figuratively or literally, positively or negatively construed..

Panels might include, but are by no means limited to:
 
-communication of bodies
-sites of intertextuality, communication of texts
-the anxiety of influence
-cross-period fertilization
-dissemination, iterability
-interfacing disparate media
-disciplinary boundaries
-adaptation, translation; literary allusion
-spaces of quarantine; containing populations
-migration, border-crossing, exile
-contact zones
-the effects of globalization
-collective formations; the multitude, the swarm
-assemblages of desire
-desecration of the sacred; impure mixtures
-rhetoric of disease, metaphors of infection and contamination

Deadline for Abstracts: Dec 1, 2004

We are committed to encompassing a spectrum of methodologies and mediums, and are seeking not only scholarly papers, but also original fiction and poetry, multimedia installations, art work, or performance pieces.  Abstracts or extracts should be no more than 300 words and must be received no later than December 1, 2004.  Please e-mail submissions to: ascgrad@cornell.edu or send by regular mail to: Theo Hummer, Department of English, 250 Goldwin Smith, Cornell University, Ithaca NY, 14850.