English Graduate Students host the annual colloquium

Our graduate students in English are very serious about research, and for the past several years they have organized a colloquium that brings together graduate students from uW and other universities, uW English faculty, and prominent keynote speakers. This year’s keynote speaker is Professor Cary Wolfe from Rice University.

It’s always a good couple of days. I can’t attend this year, as I’ll be out of the country (boo!) but you are all welcome and encouraged to check it out. Here’s the main information. There are links at the bottom of this page to more.

SAGE 2012 Colloquium: De/Centering the Human Subject:A Graduate  Conference on Posthumanism in the Humanities

Department of English Language and Literature
University of Waterloo
May 18-19, 2012

May 18: Keynote address by Professor Cary Wolfe (check out his webpage) and colloquium reception

May 19: Full day of colloquium panels and roundtables (schedule below)

Colloquium theme: A wide range of cultural theorists and philosophers classify the present age as a “posthuman” one, in which Enlightenment humanism and classical liberalism cannot be considered effective models for conceptualizing “the human.” Posthumanist thinkers question whether we have ever been only or wholly human in a way that upsets received understandings of the term, itself. Instead “the human” is thought of as a locus of ontological tension, biological hybridity, and technogenesis. While this line of thinking has given way to rich
scholarly development, to the creation of theories and critical responses to older models, what can we say posthumanism makes possible or creates? What set of conditions, what products (material or immaterial), what questions and problems does the post human present engender? Specifically, in the area of humanities research–a body of inquiry traditionally devoted, generally, to the analytical study of the human–what are the consequences or products of posthumanism?

Participants work  in the areas of literary studies, new media, rhetoric, disability  studies, animal studies, game studies, cognitive science, and other related fields.

Here’s a PDF of the schedule. SAGE Colloquium 2012 – tentative schedule
To register for the colloquium–it’s FREE–please click here.

More awesomeness from English @ Waterloo!