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Excited to add another speaker to our line-up! Siobhan Somerville is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Gender & Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Somerville’s expertise includes feminist theory, queer studies, and American literature. She has written extensively on the intersection of race and sexuality in U.S. literature and history, and is currently studying immigration law and U.S. citizenship.  Her publications include Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Duke University Press, 2000) and “Notes Toward a Queer History of Naturalization.”  American Quarterly 57.3 (2005):  659-675. She will be speaking in Curtin Hall at 2pm on Friday February 24th.

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Our keynote speaker will be Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Duke UP, 2009) and Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Duke UP, 2006) her work combines issues of temporality, queer studies, feminist theory, African American studies, and literary studies.

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The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2012 

What Happens Now?

Interdisciplinarity for the Future

On February 24-25 2012, graduate students from across academic disciplines will gather at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to query, “What happens now?”

This conference invites contemporary, cutting-edge interdisciplinary work in the humanities, arts, and sciences. We seek to raise new questions, extend disciplinary and interdisciplinary boundaries, and reflect upon the current state of knowledge production in relation to our 21st century future.

Beyond encouraging interdisciplinary methodologies, we hope to spark lively critique and debate about temporality and the concept of futurity itself.  New technologies create concerns about freedom and privacy, environmental issues loom large, and disparities of equity based on social class, race, and sexual identity mean the future may offer more anxiety than promise. The MIGC will provide a forum in which to question our roles as emerging academics in the context of current and impending global crisis.

We seek submissions of papers and presentations in the following areas:

1) Queering the Future: Critical Issues in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Topics for this panel may include responses to queer critiques of futurity, issues related to queer temporality, queer historiography, affect studies and other emerging issues in gender and sexuality studies.

2) The Global Future: Transnationalism, Activism, Politics, and the State

How will ongoing work in critical race studies and new formulations of transnationalism continue to transform the academy? How can we form new connections between academia and activism? How can we explore the context of a current “global crisis” in an academic setting?

3) The Digital Future: New Media and Emerging Technologies

How will new understandings of social media and technology help to transform our futures as teachers, researchers, and global citizens?

4) The Future of the Past: New Concepts in Intellectual History

This panel is devoted to historicizing the future, and redefining the past.

Please specify which panel you would like to contribute to and submit a 250-500 word abstract outlining your work. Submissions should include your name, institutional affiliation, the title of your paper and a 1 page CV.

Send all submissions to: themigc@gmail.com by December 1, 2011

Travel funds will be available to those traveling to Milwaukee to attend the conference.

The MIGC is co-sponsored by the Center for 21^st Century Studies 

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