The Department of English Graduate Student Advisory Committee announces their 15th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference. “Words Matter” aims to interrogate politics, rhetoric, and social justice in moments of national and international upheaval. We aim to address these terms individually, but also their entanglements across historical moments and geographical locations.

What are the modern and pre-modern histories of these terms? How do literary and visual texts engage questions of politics, rhetoric, and social justice? What are the physical and material manifestations of these concepts? How do genre, discipline, and methodology impact the representation and study of these topics? What roles do both written and spoken words have in politics? Who/what has a voice and who/what is silenced socially and politically? How is rhetoric informed by politics, and what are the implications of their entanglements? What do we mean by “social justice” and how has this term been shaped historically? How do digital and virtual cultures intersect with social justice, and how have those cultures changed our perceptions of political movement and rhetorical engagement?

Please see our conference website for updates and further details.

Keynote Speaker:
Rosa A. Eberly, Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and English, Pennsylvania State University

This conference is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and the Cultural Studies Program.