Conferences

A conference commemorating the publication of Her True-True Name with women writers from the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbean.

Her True-True Name Celebration

Investigated the relations of African American influence, resistance and identification across a range of aesthetic mediums, from film, music, visual culture, digital platforms and art, to literature and poetics.

Genealogies & Futures of Black Aesthetics

Scholarly centerpiece of the University of Maryland’s FrankenTerps celebration of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

Body of Frankenstein

Placed writers, artists and critics in conversation to explore the term “Black British,” as a category influencing writers and critics, and networks and obstacles, in the United Kingdom and in the United States.

Forming Black Britain

Surveyed shifts in feminist research, writing, editing and pedagogical practices over the last 30 years as it celebrates and honors the careers of Shirley Wilson Logan and Jane Donawerth.

Women, Rhetoric, Writing

Assessed play as the principle of innovation and experimentation that underwrites gaming, performance and other cultural, social and aesthetic activities.

 In Play

Reconceived the relationship between sound and text; considered soundscapes, audio technologies, acoustic ecologies and the sonic dimensions of literature.

Sound+

Asked how the challenges of representing complex phenomena—whether in language, film, computer modeling or other media—affect our understanding of it.

Representing Complexity

Broadened understanding of changing meanings of race and nation through the prism of legal and literary studies.

Race, Law, and American Literary Studies

Honored the career of Jeanne Fahnestock with a survey of current trends in research and teaching of rhetorical studies and writing pedagogies.

Perspectives on Writing and Rhetoric

Redefined research, teaching, and conceptualization of categories surrounding “world literature”; introduced wrinkles and wrenches in the theorization of time and space of World Literature.

Rethinking World Literature/Other World Literatures

Explored how conceptions of the blood permeated discourses of human difference from 1500 to 1900 across histories, nations and literatures and contributed to ongoing debates about the “invention” of race.

Bloodwork: The Politics of the Body 1500-1900

Enabled a critical rethinking of the act of reading; brought together scholars working on the topic of comparative reading writ large.

Reading Comparatively: Theories, Practices, Communities

Honored one of the foremost poets in the United States.

Stanley Plumly and Poetry