The theme of this year’s Wilson College Orr Forum is concerned with the apocalypse, both in biblical representation and thought as well as more scientific and climactic concern. This Humanities Conference wishes to extend this theme beyond these global concerns to focus on doom. Always impending, doom encapsulates fears for both humanity and the individual. Doom can be personal and communal, practical and rhetorical, quite real or simply hyperbole.

This conference looks to how the various fields represented by the Humanities explore our own relationship to this impending notion that things will not work out as we hope, or, conversely, that things will work out exactly as we fear. How can we use the Humanities to make sense of how we pessimistically perceive/have perceived our future? How can we use what we study to understand more about our own fears for what is about to come, or how we perceive the possibilities of cataclysm, whether individual or global?

Please feel free to interpret the theme of this conference liberally. Our goal is to bring a group of Humanities scholars from around the region together to articulate and celebrate these always intriguing and confounding questions of time, anticipation, endings, fear, and the manner in which our fields seek to understand any point in-between. Thus whether impending or upon us, singular or global, or even just a megalomaniac in a silver mask and a green cape, we hope to use this conference to explore all relevant aspects of doom.

Faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars are invited to submit. Undergraduate students may also submit abstracts, but their submission must be sponsored by a current faculty member at their institution. (For more on this, please contact the conference director.)

To submit a presentation, please send an abstract of approximately 200 words to the email address below.

Send abstracts to:
Dr. Michael G. Cornelius
Program Director, MA in Humanities
Director, Wilson College Humanities Conference
mcornelius at wilson.edu
Submit the abstract as either a .doc or .docx file or simply place it into the text of the email itself.

Individual presentations will last no more than 15 minutes; panels of up to 3 individuals may be submitted as well. Each conference participant may submit only one abstract. Abstracts are due by JANUARY 10, 2016.

The conference is sponsored by Wilson’s M.A. in Humanities program, in conjunction with the Orr Forum 2015-16 Lecture and Performance Series.