Re-membering
Boston University Romance Studies Graduate Student Conference
Dates: April 22-23, 2016
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Peter Mahoney, Stonehill College
Deadline for Abstracts: March 1, 2016
“To interrogate a tradition, venerable though it may be, is no longer to pass it on intact.” — Pierre Nora
The following information about the first annual Boston University Romance Studies Graduate Student Conference has been provided by the conference organizing committee:
Pierre Nora, in his essay, “Les lieux de mémoire,” suggests that intellectual inquiry results in the dismemberment of its subject. The self-imposed mission of not just the historian, but of modern society at large, thus becomes to transform this subject back into a coherent whole, to re-member it.
How can a physical, textual, or theoretical body be dismantled and put back together? What reconfigurations are possible? War, memory, renovation, and revolution all create something new from the fragments of a previous order. This conference will seek to examine the process of re-membering through a multidisciplinary lens. Topics may include:
- Issues of political revolution
- Re/claiming space within society
- Lacan and the body
- Memories of violence or trauma
- Non-linear storytelling
- Translations in language or artistic medium
- Synecdoche and other symbolic constructions
- Appropriation of the Other
- Hybridization
- The Grotesque
The committee welcomes alternative interpretations of the theme.
Please submit abstracts (250 words) to rsgsabu [at] gmail [dot] com. Papers may be submitted in English, French, or Spanish. The deadline for submission is March 1, 2016. Submission decisions will be sent out by March 15.
