Events Organized or Endorsed by the Caucus The Graduate Student Caucus organizes on average two panels at the annual meeting of the MLA. For more information on the panels, please contact the First Vice-President of the caucus. The CfPs will be circulated on familiar listservs, and any graduate student in the modern languages is eligible to participate. Additional events relevant to graduate students will also be posted below.
The Graduate Student Caucus invites proposals for papers to be presented at the 2014 MLA annual meeting (Chicago, Jan. 9-12, 2014). Please send abstracts (ca. 300 words) on one of the following topics to Loic Bourdeau (lbourdeau@ucdavis.edu) by March 10.
Exile, Death, Sacrifice: The Poetics of Suffering in Francophone Literature We seek papers that investigate the topics of exile, death, and sacrifice in Francophone literature (19th to 21st century) with a focus on the writing of “souffrance” (suffering) and its implications. These themes are in line with current issues of mobility, otherness, identity and loss thereof, as well as sexuality and violence and emotions. We invite graduate students from various disciplines to submit proposals that may either focus on one of the topics or their interrelationship. We welcome and strongly encourage a variety of methodological approaches and comparative analyses, along the following themes (list not exhaustive): cinematographic adaptation of suffering; writing exile; death, and/or sacrifice; sexuality and otherness as pain; performativity of suffering; exile, identity and roots; suffering and being; Orientalism and pain; reading suffering; (im)migration; writing/reading violence; etc.
Compromising, Negotiating: Being a Graduate Student For this roundtable, we seek interventions from 6/7 graduate students who wish to present on the following topics (list not exhaustive):
How to be a graduate student (but not only)?
Being a parent, being a graduate student
Private life, privacy, and interacting with your peers: How much should you reveal about yourself?
How to negotiate conflicts with your peers/professors?
How to deal with discrimination?
How to live heathy while being a graduate student? How to live on a budget?
Preparing for your exams, preparing for the market: negotiating priorities?
What if being a professor is not for me?
We invite graduate students to submit proposals for short interventions (8 minutes) that call attention to the aforementioned topics (not limited) so as to reflect on what it entails to be in graduate school and find ways to make the experience less stressful.
Sessions organized at the 2013 MLA annual meeting: "LGBTQI Graduate Students and Academia" (organized by Ervin Malakaj & Corey Twitchell, moderated by Corey Twitchell) "Tropes of Passing Time in the 19th-century European Novel" (organized and moderated by Ervin Malakaj)
