Abstact deadline August 31st, 2011.
Conference on Oct 14th, 2011

contact email: artofoutrage@gmail.com

This one day interdisciplinary conference will be held at Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus in New York City: (113 W 60th)

We are currently accepting applications from PhD and MA students (as well as junior faculty members, professors and independent scholars). The conference is free of charge and includes breakfast and an after-keynote reception w/food and beverages.

We are also currently working on an after-conference event, which will most likely involve drink specials at a local pub.

We strongly encourage applicants from Law, Psychology, History, Philosophy, Theology, English, Gender Studies, and other programs to apply.

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Keynote Speaker: Prof. Russ Castronovo, Jean Wall Bennet Professor of English and American Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Prof. Castronovo's publications include:
Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007);

Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001);

Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)

Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, co-edited with Dana Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002)

More information at: http://www.english.wisc.edu/people/faculty/castronovo.html
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“‘They’re not like us,’ and for that reason deserve to be ruled.”
Edward Said on the colonizing mindset, Culture and Imperialism (1994)

Might there be degrees of intensity to processes like othering, abjection, and polarization? If we posit that certain historical and cultural moments (perhaps our own) are particularly fractured by tensions between various forms of radical extremism/extreme radicalism, how are articulations of the self and the other affected in such moments?
This interdisciplinary graduate conference, hosted by Fordham University’s Graduate English Association, calls for a day's worth of reasonable, temperate, diplomatic discourse on the topic of literary, historical, and political outrage. We are particularly concerned with investigating the role of outrage in the formation of radicalized selves and radicalized others. We take our inspiration from what many would describe as the current culturally and politically polarized American scene, but we encourage criticism and scholarship focused on the cultural productions of radically polarized eras past.
We welcome all relevant disciplinary and interdisciplinary papers, and creative presentations are especially welcome. We anticipate a wide range of methodologies, theoretical interests, and idiosyncratic material. These many include, but are not limited to, intersections of language, and/ or literature with the following:

• Colonial/postcolonial/world-literature studies
• Contemporary neurology
• Disability studies
• Education
• Feminism/gender studies
• History
• LGBTW/Queer Theory
• Peace/war studies
• Political science
• Race theory
• Religion
• Sociology/ anthropology/ psychology

Suggested Topics/ Provocations:

Culture Wars
Poles, spectrum, center/periphery, left/right, fringe, moderate, middle of the road, dualism, friction, antithesis: the metaphors we use to discuss and portray difference vary across historical periods. What are the historical conditions of their emergences? What has each enabled? What has each occluded?

How has radicalized discourse affected academia, recently and in the past? In what ways has pedagogy been invented, changed, and evolved to meet a radicalized discourse? Do the humanities have a radical future?

What are the connections between radical/extremist discourse and political geography?
The cultural work of comedy and comedians in relation to polarization.

The figure of the moderate: the value or lack thereof of posing/acting/possessing moderation in a historical, literary or social discourse.
What are the polarizing cultural effects of outrageous bodies/freaks?

Polarization/Radicalization in Literature
What extremist modes or conceits exist in literature?
Which narratives/authors demonstrate radicalized discourse and how does this discourse manifest itself in plot, theme, and/or characterization?

• Manifestos (make your own!)
• Mass psychology/groups and groupthink.
• Performance studies--affect and outrage.
• Religion: From Stoics/Cynics to Orthodox/Reformed.
• Sexuality: Polarized Bodies/Bodily Practices.
• Speeches and speechifying; rallies and mobs.
• Terrorism and the Terrorized.

Presentations will be limited to 15 minutes. Please submit an abstract of 250 words as a MS Word attachment along with contact information, including name, institutional affiliation, degree level, email, and phone number, by July 31st, 2011 to artofoutrage@gmail.com.

We also welcome panel proposals of three to four papers.

cfp categories:
african-american
american
bibliography_and_history_of_the_book
childrens_literature
classical_studies
cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches
ecocriticism_and_environmental_studies
eighteenth_century
ethnicity_and_national_identity
film_and_television
gender_studies_and_sexuality
graduate_conferences
interdisciplinary
medieval
modernist studies
poetry
popular_culture
postcolonial
religion
renaissance
rhetoric_and_composition
romantic
science_and_culture
theatre
theory
travel_writing
twentieth_century_and_beyond
victorian