Transvisceral: The 2015 EGSA Symposium
Keynote speaker: Sharon P. Holland, Professor of American Studies at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Raising the Dead: Reading of Death and (Black)
Subjectitivity (2000) and, most recently, The Erotic Life of Racism (2012).
In this symposium, we hope to explore the interplay of bodies and affects, ideas and
corporealities in literary, artistic, historical, and cultural productions. We acknowledge that
“visceral” refers both to bodily viscera and to deeply rooted emotions and affects, “gut feelings”
that are frequently opposed to intellectual reasoning. But what is the relationship between viscera
and the visceral? What fears, what desires are produced by the translation, transformation,
transition, and transportation of viscera and the visceral? After all, as we have recently seen,
viruses move between and within bodies, but not as quickly as our fears about them do. How
does the transvisceral play into sociopolitical, racial, and gendered anxieties? Moreover, what is
the place of the extra-logical, embodied visceral in the intellectual space of the academy?
With these and more questions in mind, the GWU English Graduate Student Association board is
proud to announce its Fifth Annual Graduate Student Symposium entitled Transvisceral, taking
place on February 6, 2015. We invite papers that explore bodily and affective crossings in the
fields of race, nationality, queerness, disability, animal studies and ecocriticism, and all other
subjects that explore the mingling of bodies and/or emotions. How do bodies cross into each
other, and how do we understand, articulate, and map the visceral feelings those crossings
evoke? Moreover, how do we understand our own transviscerality in the academy? How do we
negotiate the ability of our objects of cultural analysis to evoke visceral reactions in us and our
students?
The English Department of the George Washington University has areas of strength in Medieval
and Early Modern Literature, Crip/Queer Studies, British and Postcolonial Studies, and
American Literature and Culture. To encourage innovative dialogues, we welcome papers from
diverse time periods and disciplines, including, but not limited to the following topics:
Animal Studies
Bioethics
Border Studies
Canon, disciplines, and interdisciplinary
practices
Critical Race Studies and post-raciality
Cultural Studies
Cyborg Studies and virtual reality
Death and Dying Studies
Deconstructionism
Digital Humanities
Disability Studies
Ecocriticism and ecopoetics
Embodiments and identity
Fat Studies
Gender Studies
Globalization
Queer Theory
Temporality
PAPER/PANEL SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
The EGSA board is currently accepting paper submissions for our symposium. Please send your
300 word paper submissions, along with your contact information, to Haylie Swenson at
haylie@gwu.edu by December 12, 2014. Please include the words “EGSA Conference
Submissions” in the subject line of your e-mail.
