Graduate Field Committee in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEM-UM) | Conference
Graduate Field Committee in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEM-UM) | Conference
“Geographies of Desire” is an interdisciplinary conference that aims to foster conversation through graduate paper panels, plenary sessions with local scholars, a pedagogy master class, and a digital humanities event.
“Geographies of Desire” explores how desires are mapped across spatial planes and asks, how do spaces such as markets, shrines, bedrooms, and courts produce material, spiritual, erotic, and political desires? Geography assimilates space and erases conceptual difference between separate worlds within the confines of a controllable physical representation. But even as the fog lifts from the exterior world, a strange desire keeps pulling us toward things monstrous and divine. How, then, does the geography of desire upset or reinforce the economic, political, erotic, and cosmological centers of our universes? How do literature, the visual arts, travel narratives, histories, religious writings, natural philosophy, and theater imagine these geographies? How and why do we imagine ourselves into the personal, cultural, ecological, and political spaces of others?
Along with exciting panels featuring research hy by graduate students from the University of Maryland and beyond, participants and attendees can look forward to a keynote address by Valerie Traub (University of Michigan), and sessions featuring Ricardo Padrón (University of Virginia), Sarah Werner (Undergraduate Program Director, Folger Shakespeare Library), Elizabeth Rodini (Johns Hopkins University), Ben Tilghman (George Washington University), Theresa Coletti (University of Maryland), Katherine Jansen (Catholic University of America), Frances Gage (Buffalo State College), Ralph Bauer, Martin Brueckner (University of Delaware), Jyotsna Singh (Michigan State University) . Please join us for what promises to be an exhilarating event.
Please visit our website for further details, including the finalized schedule.
For more information contact: Amy Merritt (merritta@umd.edu)