Call for Papers
Unruly Borders
“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and
undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”
-Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
The English Graduate Students Association of the University of Ottawa is excited to review your submissions for our 2024 Conference
Borders demarcate relations, often serving to protect people, environments and institutions from
violence and prejudice. Whereas borders can create a sense of communal belonging and protect
marginalized members of society, they can likewise insulate privilege and obscure the disenfranchised. By necessity, the border-defining process produces archives completed by liminal differentiation according to the archiver.
Neither archives nor borders are static; they are in a constant state of flux. Archives attempt to
document, classify, and account for our world which changes just as frequently. How do we critically engage with the contradictions of joyful belonging and violent oppression that constitute the borders of our lives? What are the effects of these imaginary yet tangible divisions on our ways of knowing, and when is it time to modify, enforce, or reject them? Ultimately, how might we (re)construct borders with empathy and approach archival productions of difference with compassion?
Works may address but are not limited to:
(Un)natural Topography:
- ‘protected’
ecosystems
- liminal spaces
- human-made
enclosures
- cartography
Genre:
- reality & fiction
- gatekeeping
- academization
Gender:
- (un)paid labour
- the domestic sphere
- non/normativity
Autonomy & Nationalism:
- settler colonialism
- policing identity
- bodies &
pathologization
- segregation
- gentrification
In an effort to resist definitive borders, works in any narrative form, and concerning any era, are welcome. This includes spoken, written, recorded, and remembered narratives of academic and non-academic origin. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to uottawa.conference@gmail.com by 15 February 2024. Presentations of 15-20 minutes are encouraged. Please include a biography of no more than 300 words with your submission. The EGSA’s goal is to make space for dynamic, interdisciplinary conversations.
“For an incomplete archive to speak with the fullness of a voice, it has to be created, not out of nothing but out of the debris of information, on the very site of the ruins, the remains and traces left behind by those who passed away. For this to happen … [i]t must provide them with a home or place where they might be at peace.”
-Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
This conference will be held on the unceded lands of the Anishinaabe Algonquin People in the
settler colonial city of Ottawa. Panels will be multi-modal to ensure that individuals from all parts of humanity can contribute, participate, and learn together.
2024 Conference Schedule
EGSA Conference Committee Co-Chair’s Welcome
4:00PM-4:15PM
Amy Peters
Keynote Speaker
4:15PM-5:15PM
Jay Odjick - Cross-Genre Creativity
Break
5:15PM-5:30PM
refreshments provided
Novel Representations of States and Nations
5:30PM-7:00PM
Ashley Fernando - Adichie’s Depiction of the Biafran
War and Saro-Wiwa
Benzir Dmello - Western Gatekeeping in Afghan
Women’s Digital Book Culture
Dhanya Raghavan - Reconstructing Afropolitan
Realities: Identity Exile, and Affect in Adichie’s Americanah
Social Event at Father & Sons
7:00PM-10:00PM
112 Osgoode StreetBreakfast
8:30AM-9:00AM
refreshments provided
Early Modern British Literature
9:00AM-10:30AM
led by: Jack O’Flaherty
Alison Hada - (De)Constructing Gender: The Demarcation
of the Desired Body in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20
Ariella Ruby - ‘The Barren Land Shall be Made Fruitful’:
Comparing Early Modern Conceptions of Britain’s Blasted
Heaths
Mel Au - The Bestial Poetics of Rebellion
Plenary Talks
10:30AM-12:00PM
led by: Lina Svadkovskaia
Professor Sara Landreth - Anticks to Languor: Unruly
Deportment in Abolition-Era Literature
Professor Victoria Burke - Religious and Generic Borders in
Seventeenth-Century English Women’s Manuscript Writing
Lunch
12:00PM-1:30PM
meal and refreshments provided
The Long Nineteenth Century
1:30PM-3:00PM
Samantha Stellato - The Path to the Middle Class: A
Melodramatic Mapping of East Lynne
Ian Soutar - Ollivia’s Errantry: ‘Giving-on-and-with’ The
Women of Colour
Nawaal Bhuiyan - Woolf’s Women: The Peculiar Post-
Victorian Lady, and Angrogynous Expression as a Form of
Resistance, in To the Lighthouse
The Cold Twentieth Century
3:00PM-4:30PM
led by: Gideon Brobbey
Cierra Cowan - Exploring the Pleasure of Plot Across
Mediums: A Neuroaesthetics-Informed Close Reading
of Murder on the Orient Express
Jordan Manning - Poems “Cannot Live Alone Anymore
than We Can” The Poetics of Loneliness and
Community in Jack Spicer’s After Lorca
Martin Breul - A Matter of Perspective: The Self-Image
of Canadian Literature and its Perception in Socialist
East Germany 1960 - 1978
Break
4:30PM-5:00PM
refreshments provided
Speculative Imaginations of Borders in New Contemporary Fiction
5:00PM-6:30PM
led by: Professor Suyi Okungbowa
participants: Vera Hadzic, Jillian Clasky, Kendra
Guidolin
Social Event at Father and Son’s
6:45PM-10:00PM
112 Osgoode StreetPalestine and Academic Freedom Roundtable
1:30PM-2:30PM
Concerning Modernity
2:30PM-4:00PM
led by: Gideon Brobbey
Sinchan Chatterjee - Dis-arranging Borders: Autistic
Narratives and the Fluidity of Neurological Boundaries
Jordan J. Vines - Do not Remove Morrison: A Case
Against Homogenizing the Literary Canon
Professor James Brooke-Smith - Untimely Oscar
Closing Remarks
4:00PM-4:30PM
Professor Robert Stacey