Call for Papers (Updated 9/28/14)

23rd Annual Meeting of the British Women Writers Conference: “Relations”
June 25th-27th, 2015
Hosted by The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
at The Heyman Center, Columbia University

Relations

The British Women Writers Conference will engage the theme of “Relations” for its 23rd annual meeting to be held in New York City. The inspiration for this theme comes from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who taught at the Graduate Center from 1998-2009, and whose investment in relations continues to inspire new ways of looking at the richness and variance of (dis)connection. One of her last courses, “Reading Relations,” explored literary constructions and alternative understandings of relationality (the syllabus for the course can be seen here). Sedgwick’s interdisciplinary approach informs our conference’s investments. In this spirit, we invite papers—as well as panel proposals—that focus on possible interpretations of and approaches to relationality across a broad spectrum of topics, methods, and disciplines. We would welcome investigations of interaction, exchange, correlation, or conjunction. Alternately, treatments might focus on relationality as a political, historical, global, social, personal, critical or textual phenomenon.

For paper proposals, please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio (in a single attachment) to bwwc2015@gmail.com by January 5, 2015. For full panel proposals, please compile all proposals, along with a brief rationale for the panel, into a single document. Papers and panels must address the theme and its application to British women’s literature of the long 18th- or 19th-centuries. Graduate students whose submissions are accepted may apply to receive a travel grant sponsored by the British Women Writers Association.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

Conceptual Relations:
Influence (literary or otherwise)
Subject-Object relations
Human-Animal relations
Human-Machine relations
Darwinian relations
Affect
Connection
Complementarity
Synthesis
Affiliation
Collaboration
Spatial arrangements/Bodies in space
Communication

Personal Relations:
Sexual relations/Intimate relations
Interiority
Domestic arrangements
Care-giving, professional and personal
Courtship/Marriage/Divorce
Familial Relationships/Kinship
Friendship

Global Relations:
Cosmopolitanism
Economic systems
Trade
Exploration
Anthropological interactions

Social/Political Relations:
Social arrangements
Class relations
Labor relations
Gender relations
Community
Political relationships
Revolutionary relations
Colonial relations
Race relations
Cross-national/cross-cultural relations
Historical connections

Critical/Textual Relations:
Theoretical approaches
Hermeneutic relations
Reader relations
Biographical relationships
Literary circles/networks
Relations between literary forms/genres/traditions/
conventions
Palimpsests

Pedagogical Relations:
Pedagogical approaches
Text-Media relations
Interdisciplinarity
Adaptations

Image caption: Dido Belle with her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, formerly attrib. Johann Zoffany, 1779.