Success!

We want to thank everyone for supporting the 2014 GEO Conference this past weekend. The great success of the critical presentations Creative/MFA readings on Saturday is the collective result of the work of all our presenters, plenary speakers and faculty, committee members, moderators, volunteers, and other participants. A special thanks to all the panelists who came from outside the UMD community--come back next year! Thank you so much for contributing to the success of the conference. Have a great remainder of the semester.

Program of Activities

Saturday, March 8, 8:00 - 7:30 PM, Tawes Fine Arts Building

8:00-9:00 AM: Registration and Breakfast - 2nd Floor Foyer

9:00-10:15 AM - SESSION 1: Queer Ecologies and Landscapes - Moderator: Rachel Vorona - Room 3132

1. “Reading Objects: Titus Andronicus and the Ethics of Knowledge,” Jeffrey Griswold, UMD
2. “The Water We Breathe” Haylie Swenson, George Washington University
3. “Object as Subject: Decentering the Human in H.D.’s Sea Garden,” Rhiannon Basile, Rutgers University, Newark

10:25-11:40 AM - SESSION 2: Transgressive Subjectivities and Interrogating the Self - Moderator: Tim Bruno - Room 3132

1. “Outplacement, Biographical Learning, and the Rhetorical Work of English Studies: A Personal-Professional Narrative,” Oliver Brearey, UMD
2. “Mirror, Mirror: The Bluest ‘I’ and the Construction of Pecola’s Subjectivity,” Hannah Dow, Loyola Marymount University
3. “Disabilities and Demigods: Failed Transgressions in Hopkinson’s Sister Mine,” Collier Cobb, UMD

11:45 AM-1:00 PM: LUNCH/MFA READINGS - Moderator: Tim DeMay - 2nd Floor Foyer/Room 2115

1. “Coming of Age” and “N’Djamena, Meaning We Will Rest,” Aaron Brown, UMD
2. “Sanction” and “Translucency,” Noa Saunders, UMD
3. “Banksy,” Radford Skudrna, UMD

1:10-2:40 PM - PLENARY PANEL:  Zones of Trespass - Moderator: Dr. Scott Trudell - Art/Sociology Bldg. Room 2203
1. “Selfhood and the Crisis of Property,” Dr. Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, UMD
2. “Trespassing in Middle English Drama: The Slaughter of the Innocents as Test Case,” Dr. Theresa Coletti, UMD
3. “Those Who Trespass Against: Prison (Writing) Networks, Cordon Sanitaire, and the Imbrication of Space and Identity,” Dr. Christopher Hazlett, UMD

2:50-4:05 PM: SESSION 3

A. Queer Representations - Moderator: John Macintosh - Room 3132

1. “Trespassing Heterotopias: the (Visual) Politics of Queer Selfies and Internet Cultures,” Helis Sikk, College of William and Mary
2. "No Longer Trespassing: Welcoming Alison Bechdel and Fun Home into Mainstream Publishing Markets," Ruth Elizabeth Morris, UMD
3. “Native Exile: Queerness, Coming of Age, and ‘Thirdspace’ in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy,” Kelley Grashoff, George Washington University

B. Trespassing in the Political Sphere - Moderator: Jamison Kantor - Room 3136

1. “Revisiting Those ‘Unspeakable Things’: Socio-Political Resistance and Cultural Reformation in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Clotel; or the President’s Daughter,” Christopher Varlack, Morgan State University
2. “Josephine Herbst and the Transgressive Nature of Reproductive Modernism,” Liz DePriest, UMD
3. “The [Girl] Power of Capitalism: Appropriations of a Subversive Feminist Movement,” Cassie Clark, George Washington University

4:15-5:30 PM: Session 4

A. After/Life - Moderator: Molly Marotta - Room 3132
1. “Cultures of the Dead: Anonymity and Structures of Feeling in Gray’s Elegy,” Jonathan C. Williams, UMD
2. “Destruction and Reconstitution: The Body as a Book in John Donne,” Stephen Rojcewicz, UMD
3. “Living Trespass: Metaphysical Exchange on the Border of Life and Death,” Kayla Harr, UMD

B. Violence Without Bounds - Moderator: Emily Perez - Room 3136
1. “Sexual Violence in the Mbembean Postcolony: The Grounded Flight of En-Zombied Resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory,” Sarah Bonnie, UMD
2. “Familiar Monsters: Feuds, Fratricide, and Failure in Beowulf,” Jennifer Ross, UMD
3. “Trespassing on Trauma: What Makes Some Concentration Camp Narratives More Popular Than Others,” Nicole Sybesma, Rutgers University

5:45-7:30 PM: RECEPTION/MFA READINGS - Moderator: Tim DeMay - 2nd Floor Foyer/Room 2115
1. “Manhunt,” Emily Banks, UMD
2. “Transubstantiation,” Ruth Elizabeth Morris, UMD
3. “Fig Leaf” and “Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara,” Will Faragason, UMD

Deadline Extended

The GEO Conference Committee has extended the deadline for submitting abstracts to the Spring 2014 Trespassing(s) conference. Email abstracts to conference.geo@gmail.com by Friday, January 17, 2014. Proposals for fifteen-minute papers from a broad range of disciplines and theoretical backgrounds are encouraged. Proposals on creative work must be a short sample from an original composition. Panel submissions (3-4 participants) are highly encouraged. Please limit individual abstracts to 300 words and panel abstracts to 500 words. Full papers may accompany abstracts. And please include three keywords at the end of the abstract to assist panel formation.

Call for Papers

7th Annual Graduate English Organization Conference

“Trespassing(s)”

Department of English

University of Maryland, College Park

March 7-8, 2014

In everyday life, the phrase “NO TRESPASSING” most often asserts the integrity of private property against intrusion. Such warnings mark legal, political, and cultural boundaries around zones that have particular expectations of action and even consciousness. What is acceptable in one site may be labeled taboo or criminalized in another. Of course, the concept of trespassing is not limited to issues of property rights and law; the idea of transgression against norms appears in virtually all fields of inquiry. This conference will focus on ideas of “trespassing” as a category of physical, conceptual, or representational acts; we hope to explore both the motivations for and experiences of trespassing as well as the structures of thought and power that define it. To trespass is inherently a violating act, and some trespasses are perhaps only cast as villainy. On the other hand, to trespass can also be to perform resistance against injustice. Even so, as Fredric Jameson notes in The Political Unconscious, “it is commonplace that transgressions, presupposing the laws or norms or taboos against which they function, thereby end up precisely reconfirming such laws.”

Questions that our participants might address are: How do acts come to be defined as transgressive? How do historical definitions of trespassing influence today’s? How do we navigate or reorient entrenched definitions of trespass, or combat persistently undesirable violations? Who are those that can trespass; who can be trespassed against? How can acts of trespassing be turned against hegemony? "Is trespassing limited to the crossing or blurring of established legal or moral boundaries? Is the negative idea of trespass essential to the positive construction of social, political, legal, or geographical zones? How does trespassing become innovation, or vice versa? What is changing or has changed about the relationships between transgression and corporate or political entities? What happens to trespassing in our era of purported deterritorialization? How do nonhumans--animals, plants, natural objects, artificial objects, etc.--experience or engage in trespassing? How does trespass become impossible; when and where is the possibility or proclivity towards transgression absent?

We invite submissions that engage with any aspect of the conference theme, broadly construed. Topics of potential essays can include, but are not limited to:

• Law, and Literature, Art and Culture
• Affect and Trespassing
• Property, Privacy, and Subjectivity
• Bodies and Borders: Immigration, Tourism, Exchange
• Reading/Writing against the Academic Grain
• “Breaking Bad”: Becoming/Being a Transgressive Subject
• Villains and Villainy
• Transgression and Redemption
• Innovation in Science and Technology
• “Matter Out of Place”
• Experimental Literature and Art
• Banned Books
• Original Sin: Founding Culture and History in Transgression
• War, International Law, and Representation
• Civil/Uncivil Disobedience
• Frontier Fantasies: Trespassing without Consequence

The conference committee invites proposals for fifteen-minute papers from a broad range of disciplines and theoretical backgrounds. Panel submissions (3-4 participants) are highly encouraged. Please limitindividual abstracts to 300 words and panel abstracts to 500 words. And please include three keywords at the end of the abstract to assist panel formation. 

 The conference committee will present an award for the best conference paper selected from a pool of papers submitted for consideration at least 3-4 weeks before the conference date. 

Abstracts are due December 22, 2013 and should be e-mailed to conference.geo@gmail.com.  
We are committed to ensuring access and inclusion during the event for all attendees and participants. Please contact the conference committee with any concerns, questions, or specific accommodations.