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.
2026: Disruption
Disruption is multidirectional; it can signify a disturbance, an interruption, or a change with a dynamic range of minor to radical ramifications. It can lead to chaos or destruction, but it can also yield innovation, growth, and development. Disruption can be an outlet for collective communities, a force that propels society towards the future. It simultaneously resists stagnation and embraces and contextualizes tradition. We can disrupt tradition by experimentation, reassessment, revision, and reinvestigation. Disruption can even be found in the reanalysis of tradition, for tradition itself can be restored in order to disrupt or prevent its loss. We might say the history of its creative media is a history of disruption: texts, films, songs, and games are constantly appealing to and disrupting those that came before them.
Download the 2026 symposium program.
Past Symposia
2025: Planetary Prisms: Solidarities, transformations, and resistances
Download the 2025 symposium program.
2024: Shifting Borders and Bodies
Download the 2024 symposium program.
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)