Call for Papers
Home: The Space We Claim
March 14-16, 2025
University of Ottawa, English Graduate Student Association 2025 Conference
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition”
- James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room.
“Home” in literature is a space of creation and negotiation, both a tangible space and an elusive
concept. It can transcend architecture, as well as shape identity, belonging, and memory. Home
can be immutable, inherited or created, at once abstract and concrete. Writers continuously
grapple with the ways home both shapes and is shaped by the individual, community, and forces
of history. It is often as much about what we seek as it is what we escape from, and it spreads
across genres and modes, from the domestic, diasporic, nostalgic, and speculative.
The 2025 EGSA Conference Committee invites you to explore “home”; how does a text make a home? Does it shape the stories we tell about ourselves and others? How is it used as a
microcosm for societal tensions, generational conflict, or the roles of gender, class, and power
within the family structure? Is home really where the heart is?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Home and family dynamics
• Homelessness and literature
• The role of fantasy and idealized
spaces
• Ecocriticism: home and the natural
world
• The undoing of home: apocalyptic
narratives
• Ephemerality: transience vs.
permanence
• Home and the “other”: alienation and
outsiders
• Home and ideology: politics,
nationalism, patriotism
• Role of home in coming-of-age stories
• Speculative and science fiction: real
and imagined spaces
• Feminist perspectives: domesticity,
gender roles, liberation
• Poetics of home: language, sound,
atmosphere
• Home in post-colonial and diasporic
literature
• Home as physical space: architecture,
setting, symbolism
• Home as psychological space: memory,
trauma, identity
• The uncanny: the “un-homely”
• Displacement, exile, migration
We welcome submissions in both creative and academic forms, spanning literary and
interdisciplinary fields. We are looking to create a vibrant platform for cross-disciplinary discussions. Our three-day conference will be held in-person, and presentations of 15-20 minutes are encouraged.
“I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the ear lobe.”
- Maya Angelou, Letter to my Daughter.
Please submit abstracts of 150-200 words and an author’s biography of no more than 50 words to uottawa.conference@gmail.com by February 28th, 2025. If you have any questions, please send them to uottawa.conference@gmail.com.
2025 Conference Schedule
Sign-In
1:30-2:00pm
Opening remarks
2:00-2:15 pm
Doris and Kirsten
Home and the Family Unit (panel 1)
2:15-3:45 pm
Moderated by Luna Guindon-Gough
Jessie Cameron: Unusual Accommodations? The Destabilized Home in Octavia Butler’s
“Bloodchild”
Jenna Dobbelsteyn: “I’ll Have to Make Up My Mind:” Family and Uncertainty in Alistair
MacLeod’s The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
Aashline Avarachan: Black Masculinity in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep
Total Rewrite
4:00-5:30 pm
How AI Demeans Our Written Culture (Michael Harris)
At Desmarais Hall (DMS), Room 4101, 55 Laurier Ave E
Social
6:00-8:00pm
Nostalgica, 601 Cumberland PrivateSign-in
8:00-8:30am
Breakfast
8:30-9:00am
Keynote speaker
9:00-10:00am
Hollay Ghadery
Home and the Corporeal Body (panel 2)
10:00-11:30am
Moderated by Sara Landreth
Tatiana Jahromi : (Dis)Orientations and Affective Belonging in Cockroach and Dear Current Occupant
Zara Diab: The American Dream Nightmare: How the Dream of the Coast Narrative Enables Incel Entitlement
Tyler Escott: An Orgasm is the Key: Sex Criminals and Graphic Literature’s Sexy Space(s)
Lunch
11:30-1:00pm
Forming Home in Technological Landscapes (panel 3)
1:00-2:30pm
Moderated by Alex Lambourne
Rashika Desai: The Vampiric and Digital in Octavia Butler’s Fledging
Max Yang: Precarious Homes: Queer Kinship and the Disorientation of Home
Raisa Rasheeka: Migration and Intermarriage in the Age of Digital Diaspora
Break
2:30-2:45pm
Making Home in Spite of Displacement
2:45-4:15pm
Moderated by Ran Tao
Sarah Fenchington: What Home Means in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan
Dasha Sotnikova: Homelessness and migration against Nazi appropriation in the poetry of Paul Celan
Mustafa Baqai: Theorizing Home Through Crip of Color Critique, Mad Disorientation, and Decolonial Embodiment
Break
4:15-4:30pm
Home Through Varied Poetic Perspectives (panel 5)
4:30-6:00pm
Moderated by Maryyam Inam
Julia Bifulco: “you and your daughter will learn together”: Mother Tongue in Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS
Riley Hollars: “A Garden of One’s Own”: Creating Homes and Safe Spaces
Kalie Chapman: The Poetics of Stem: Rebuilding ‘Home’ as Psychological SpaceSign-in
8:30-9:00am
Breakfast
9:00-9:30am
Forming Home Amidst Changing Spaces (panel 6)
9:30-11:00am
Moderated by Ethan Coleman
Kirsten Favreau
Aidan Johnson: Passing Through: The Mobility of Shame in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Marjan Abdolahi: Unhomely Belonging: Mythic Home, Liminality, and Transnational Hybridity in Diasporic Literature
Homeland: Dreams of the Diaspora Roundtable (panel 7)
11:00 am-12:00pm
Moderated by Maia Marchand
Participants: Maya Abdalla, Munia Islam, Sarah Fournel
Lunch
12:00-1:30pm
Home as the Unhomely Female Space (panel 8)
1:30-3:00pm
Moderated by Kirsten Favreau
Sayantani Choudhury: The Unhomely Home and The World: Women and Their Spaces in Bengali Art Cinema
Nawaal Bhuiyan: The Public and Private Mutability of Female Sex Work in the Italian Renaissance, as Depicted in Veronica Franco’s Terze Rime
Stephanie Sushko: Claiming Space in Dianne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here
Closing Statement
3:00pm
Ethan