Brown University Graduate Conference
Corporeal Conversations / Conversations corporelles
March 10-11, 2023 | Brown University | Providence, Rhode Island
Keynote: Dr. Nora Martin Peterson
Associate Professor of French Cultural Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
“Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre” announces Michel de Montaigne to the readers of his autobiographical Essais. While initially speaking to the reader, Montaigne would later become a reader himself, critically conversing with his own text in the margins of previous editions. This archive of edits underscores the materiality of a “body” of work as a site and subject of conversation between readers, authors, and critics alike. As a literary experiment in both style and voice, the Essais continue to shape and be shaped by conversations. In this tradition, Equinoxes 2023 seeks to provoke new dialogues around existing corpuses, to think about our relationship to creative works and the archive of criticism that comes with them.
Works of art call out to each other, engaging in conversations that span borders and epochs. From the circulation of written works within salon culture to the power of images to capture a movement, how might we understand our interactions with media and each other as conversations centered around and facilitated by bodies? Bodies continue to be a site of political struggle, from the policing of race, gender, and reproduction to the increasing awareness of our own environmental entanglements. What might we learn from listening to and/or reading bodies, in their various material representations? Papers may address the following topics: the construction of a corpus, the relationship between text and criticism, issues of voice, how bodies speak for themselves, the legibility of a body as racialized, gendered, and/or disabled, the afterlife of a work of art, the legacy of creative traditions, the construction of archives, and texts as living documents. Finally, how might our own interventions be understood as corporeal conversations in their own right?
As an interdisciplinary conference, Equinoxes encourages submission from a variety of fields, including but not limited to literature, philosophy, history, ethnography, anthropology, media studies, disability studies, sociology, art history, religious studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and political science, provided that the presentation relate to French or Francophone studies.
Graduate students who wish to participate in the conference should submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with a short bio. Abstracts must be sent, as attachments, to equinoxes-conference@brown.edu before December 31, 2022. Emails should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Presentations, whether in English or in French, should not exceed 20 minutes.