The purpose of this annual symposium is to capture a snapshot of the intergenerational and multifaceted contributions of students, alumni, and faculty to our dynamic learning community. In this one-day event, we seek not only to highlight the importance of the humanities in the university but also to foster a sense of shared discourse and intellectual collaboration and to celebrate all the different kinds of work that we do.
2024: Shifting Borders and Bodies
The 13th Annual Graduate English Symposium, “Shifting Borders and Bodies,” asks what happens, and what is at stake, when borders are mapped onto specific bodies, human and textual. How do manipulations of borders, past and present, impact human and textual bodies? What strategies do texts use to address the impacts of legislative, culturally limiting or prohibiting, or even aggressively or violently achieved and maintained borders? Our conference addresses how rapid transformations in technology, national borders, global warfare, climate, textual forms, and conceptions of personal and national identity impact demarcations that once defined our world.
Download the 2022 symposium program.
Past Symposia
2023: Resilient Communities
Download the 2023 symposium program.
2022: (Dis)orientations
Download the 2022 symposium program.
2021: Isolation & Connection: An Ethos for 2020 and Beyond
The theme of Isolation & Connection serves both to acknowledge the global unrest and large-scale suffering that have characterized recent months and to honor the resilience, optimism, and creativity with which people face adversity and continue to build community and care for one another. While inspired by the pandemic and other events of 2020, this symposium encourages work that explores moments and effects of isolation and/or connection throughout history, across diverse platforms and literary and artistic genres, and in both local and transnational contexts. How might current events reframe our reading, or writing, of literature? What can the texts and events of bygone eras teach us about our current moment? How might we reimagine our commitments to teaching and intellectual community-building in a socially distant world? What possibilities does art, broadly construed, hold to shape our future? We welcome submissions that treat the theme of Isolation & Connection from a variety of critical, creative, and pedagogical approaches. For more information visit the 2021 English Symposium website.
2020: Casting Light and Creating Shadows (Website)
Due to COVID-19, the Ninth Annual English Symposium was canceled and reorganized as a virtual site.
2019: Identities Remixed (Event Program)
2018: Breaking Boundaries & Making Spaces (Event Program)
2017: Agents & Agency (Event Program)
2016: Dislocation / Discovery (Event Program)
2015: Becoming (De) Familiarized (Event Program)
2014: The Other that is (Not) Me (Event Program)
2013: Consuming Objects (Event Program)
2012: Reimagining Subjects (Event Program)