Proposals are invited for the 2020 University of Sheffield Postgraduate Colloquium to be held on Friday 22nd May 2020. The theme of this interdisciplinary conference is Landscapes. With extreme weather events, governments in crisis and sea levels on the rise, environmental and political climates seem to have reached a boiling point. In a society in turmoil over Brexit negotiations, the climate crisis often goes ignored. Whether political or environmental, it is abundantly clear that the landscapes we inhabit are no longer defined by stable factors, if they ever were. How do we make sense of these landscapes during turbulent times in which their topographies are constantly shifting? Tomorrow we may hear that yet another animal has gone extinct, or that we are facing another Brexit extension. How might the landscapes we live in – whether ecological, political, cultural, or otherwise – be redefined in a way that responds to the most urgent challenges of our time?
The Postgraduate Colloquium is an annual one-day conference organised by the School of English of the University of Sheffield. The Colloquium brings together students and researchers from disciplines including English Literature, Linguistics, Theatre and Creative Writing from various institutions in the UK. We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations on a wide range of topics concerning the above theme. We welcome academic presentations as well as experimental and creative submissions. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- The political landscape created (or dismantled) by Brexit
- Postcolonial political and/or environmental landscapes, including issues such as multilingualism, language attitudes and globalisation
- Ecocritical landscapes
- Landscapes of race
- Landscapes of class
- Queer landscapes
- Feminist landscapes
- Sociolinguistic landscapes
- Theolinguistic landscapes and/or the inclusion of religion in political landscapes
- Historical linguistics and its impact upon current landscapes
- Pastoral landscapes
- Romantic landscapes
- Modernist landscapes
- Landscapes of ecological and/or political diversity
- Landscapes of resurrection
- Landscapes in film