SPACE AND PLACE
University of Virginia Department of English Graduate Symposium
April 4th, 2025
Those of us living in the United States are never more attuned to the language, culture, and politics of our respective regions than we are in an election year. From ever-changing congressional districts to the housing crisis, climate-related mobility, and forced relocations in search of reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare, our “imagined communities”—to use Benedict Anderson’s influential concept—are frequently at odds with our lived environments. Jennifer Greeson uses the term “geographic fantasy” to describe the ways in which imagined regions transcend and compress place all at once, thereby signifying sentiments not shared by their diverse occupants. How can we reconcile the locations in the news and on the page with the land that we stand on?
This year, the University of Virginia’s Graduate Symposium invites graduate students studying arts and humanities across Virginia and Washington, D.C., to consider how space and place affect their research and the communication thereof. How do our physical locations influence our scholarship and pedagogy? What does it mean to move between institutions as an academic while pursuing the same line of scholarly inquiry? How can we acknowledge the specificities of our spaces and places while building expansive intellectual communities? And how should we articulate our sense of institutional belonging when those institutions depart from our values?
The spaces and places explored during our Symposium may range in size from rooms to continents to more abstract locales altogether; for example, consider the ways an individual or an idea might “hold space.” Thinkers may engage with their spaces and places from within or afar. The points they interrogate may be close to home or distant. With hopes to craft an expansive conversation on our theme, we invite scholars from a range of disciplines and backgrounds to explore the significance of space and place in their own fields.
Potential topics to be addressed may include:
- Regional and national relationalities
- Diaspora, forced migration, and climate-related mobility
- Disability and movement
- Environmental humanities and natural space
- Material culture and the built landscape
- De facto vs. de jure understandings of place
- Language, linguistics, and location
- Decolonial and postcolonial thought
- Place-conscious pedagogies
- First-person criticism
Presentations should be no longer than 15-20 minutes. In addition to accepting traditional academic papers, we also encourage submissions featuring creative work with academic components (such as creative nonfiction, documentary poetics, or multimedia presentations). Please specify in your submission whether any alternative categories apply to your paper and if you would require AV equipment.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short bio to this form by Friday, January 3rd, 2025, at 11:59pm Eastern time.
Contact the Graduate Symposium co-chairs Spencer Grayson (ndg9ja@virginia.edu) and Gabby Kiser (qaz7ju@virginia.edu) with any questions.