Department of English, Indiana University, Bloomington

Dates: Friday March 24th – Saturday March 25th, 2023

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for Indiana University’s 20th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference, hosted by the Department of English. This conference will be held virtually on Friday March 24th and Saturday March 25th. Our keynote speaker is Dr. Christy Tidwell, whose recent work includes the co-edited anthology Fear & Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, and a co-edited special issue of Science Fiction Film & Television on creature features and the environment.

In 1937, the Indiana General Assembly officially selected the phrase “Crossroads of America” as the state motto. Almost 80 years later, the Netflix show Stranger Things features the fictional town Hawkins, Indiana as a portal that leads us into the “Upside Down,” where all those “stranger” things come from, those Others desiring to annihilate us all. And the kids fight back—the familiar mixture of superpower, blood-spatter, and initiation rite. But we ask: what if we can put the war in abeyance, and cohabitate with that mirroring Otherworld and all the creatures flooding from it? What if we can replace the two-way portal with a crossroads, and (re)imagine other ways—both figuratively and literally—of defining our shared worlds? Indeed, are they really that stranger? We in the humanities have always dealt with things that are strange around us, and we enjoy and yes, have fun imagining strange, alternative worlds and different temporalities, spatialities, identities, and subjectivities that come with them. In 2023, we will make Bloomington such a crossroads, a space where not only people but animals, cyborgs, aliens, indeed, “things” come and go. Out of sync with the normative time and space, we will “make it strange.”

Relevant topics may include (but are by no means limited to):

  • Representations and interrogations of the “other”
  • Crossings of time and/or space
  • Worldbuilding
  • Materiality or materialisms
  • Liminality, borders, and/or margins
  • Ghosts, monsters, aliens, and all things “strange”
  • Narratives and counternarratives
  • Collectivity and collaboration
  • Critical identity studies
  • Genre studies
  • Studies of migration, border, and/or diaspora
  • Queer modes of composition and interpretation

Proposals might also situate these topics in the context of rhetoric and composition studies. We invite proposals that consider the “strange” world of the classroom, the role of rhetoric in studies of the strange and the other, and more. Papers that bring together critical and creative elements are also encouraged.

We invite proposals for both individual papers and organized panels:

  • Individual scholarly papers and creative works (15-minute presentations; please submit a 250-word abstract)
  • Panels organized around a thematic topic (three 20-minute papers or four 15-minute papers; please submit a 350-word panel abstract as well as a 100-word abstract for each individual paper on the panel)

Email your submission to iugradconference@gmail.com by January 15, 2023. In your email, please submit your abstract (both in the body of the email and as a Word attachment), along with your name, institutional affiliation, email, and phone number. Please note that both the keynote and the panels will be given synchronously via Zoom.