2010 Annual Graduate Student Colloquium at West Virginia University

2010 Annual Graduate Student Colloquium at West Virginia University

Call for Papers [Graduate Students]: On March 12^th and 13^th of 2010, the English Graduate Student Organization at WVU will be hosting a colloquium for graduate students of literature, creative writing, and professional writing and editing. On Friday the 12^th there will be a keynote address at 7:00 p.m., followed on Saturday the 13^th with a full day of panels scheduled between 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Graduate students from neighboring colleges are encouraged to submit abstracts for individual papers or pre-formed panels dealing with any subject within the following topics:

• Literature, Literary Studies
• Cultural Studies
• Pedagogy (Literary, Creative Writing, Composition and Rhetoric, etc.)
• Craft or Technique Oriented Creative Writing Panels
• Professional Writing and Editing, Technical Writing

Any historical periods are welcome. Individual proposals for fifteen minute presentations are being accepted. Panel proposals of up to three participants are also being accepted.

The keynote speaker this year will be Dr. Kristina Straub, who is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, Associate Head of English, and Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University where she teaches eighteenth-century British studies, performance studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies. She is the author of Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Kentucky 1986) and of Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton 1991), and co-editor of an anthology, Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (1991). She is the editor of many teaching and scholarly editions of eighteenth-century British texts, including a Bedford Cultural Edition of Burney’s Evelina and a Pickering Masters edition of Charlotte Smith’s Celestina, as well as many scholarly articles and reviews. Her newest book, Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence Between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth Century Britain was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in Spring of 2009. She is now looking forward to her return to theater studies with a new project that grows out of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama’s production of Edward Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds.

Dr. Straub’s presentation is entitled “Performing The London Cuckolds.” This lecture focuses on two texts and a performance: Edward Ravenscroft’s 1681 comedy, The London Cuckolds, Terry Johnson’s 1998 adaptation of that play, and Don Wadsworth’s 2009 production at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama (which draws on both texts). Her goal is to understand how the gendered sexualities of the 17^th century “haunt” the performance of 2009. If the 1681 version allows for a queer take on marriage and heterosexual romance in general (as she argues that it does), how does that queerness take the stage in 2009? Is this queerness “performed” by the student and faculty cast and design team in the 2009 version, and, if so, how does it play out for its modern audience, a very different community from the one that watched the play in 1681?

Please submit abstracts of approximately 250 words for paper presentations of fifteen minutes maximum. Submit abstracts to ego.wvu@gmail.com by Monday, February 8^th, 2010. Responses will be sent out by the middle of February.

Students, faculty, staff and friends of the department: Save the dates now so that you can show your support for the research and creative work of English graduate students!