CfP: 'Voice & Vulnerability' - 4th annual MML Graduate Network Conference

November 15th 2020
Bright blue background, text reads 'Voice and Vulnerability', image of stamp roll and parchment

5th-6th February 2021

Virtual Conference

 

Oxford University’s Medieval & Modern Languages Graduate Network is pleased to finally announce its 4th annual Graduate Conference. Originally planned for this year’s Trinity Term in June, our conference had to be postponed due to the pandemic. We now came up with a virtual format to involve all members from our Graduate Community regardless of their current and future location and timezone: 

The theme of this year, as chosen by the graduate students of the Medieval & Modern Languages Faculty, is Voice and Vulnerability. 

Voices appear; they are articulated and enunciated across texts of all genres, media, languages, cultures and time periods. But voices can also be misheard, misunderstood and ignored; some voices speak more loudly than others, while other voices are not heard at all, or never given the chance to speak. The vulnerability of voice can result from qualities intrinsic to the voice itself, as well as from externally determined social, political, and economic factors. Yet these voices of the vulnerable constitute a subversive potential that can be explored across (and through) the margins of literature, language and art. This conference seeks to investigate the relationship between, and intersections of, voice and vulnerability.

 

Submissions

We are pleased to call for papers which respond to the theme of the conference. Examples of such papers could include, but are not limited to: 

 

  • Cultural theory: How do both existing and non-existing archives of voices relate to the vulnerable potential of their (articulated/preserved) utopias? And how are voices (of the vulnerable) linked to memory and myth-making in literature?

  • Gender theory: How does the gender of a voice change how we read a text – and should it? How are marginal or vulnerable voices, e.g. from non-normative bodies, manifested through literature?

  • History and canonisation: How should we deal with gaps in the archives, absences, voices that are not easily recoverable to us? What kinds of voices are preserved, and which ones are forgotten? How (and why) have some voices been historically privileged over others? 

  • Narratology: In what ways, and to whom, can narrative voice be vulnerable, or make us as readers vulnerable? And how can the polyphony of voices constitute a vulnerable subjectivity or shift the notion of subject formation?

  • Performance contexts: How can we best recover the voice(s) in which a text was originally received? How can we best understand and appreciate the potential, or past, orality of written texts? 

  • Postcolonial studies: How can one make their (silenced) voice heard through the language of the dominant? What role do the voices benefited by a system founded on inequality play in the silencing of others?

  • (Post)human: What challenges or conditions constitute voices in between bodies and machines within the age of post- and transhumanism? How do voices become vulnerable in this tension, and what potential does this vulnerability reveal?

  • The body: What is the relationship between body, voice and vulnerability? What forms of knowledge is the body able to articulate? 

  • Translation theory: How are voices weakened, strengthened, or otherwise changed through the act of translation – whether from oral to written source, or from one language to another?

  • Trauma: How do artists and writers articulate the unsayable, things that are impossible to voice? What is at stake when traumatic events are used to make art? What is the narrator's responsibility when making art out of someone else's pain?

 

The Conference will take place in two virtual half-day sessions on the 5th and 6th February 2021 (Wk 3 HT). We welcome submissions to be held in English from all graduate students working in the field of Medieval & Modern Languages. The deadline for submissions of proposals (250-word abstract and short bio) is November 15th 2020 (Wk 6 MT) to ml-grad-net@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk. 

We are also excited to announce already our confirmed Keynote Speakers for this year’s conference, Prof Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary) in Modern and Comparative Studies and Dr Alicia Spencer-Hall (Queen Mary) in Medieval and Media Studies. 

For any further questions, contact us directly or our current Academic Events Officer Sophia Buck (sophia.buck@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk).

Click here for the conference programme in pdf form: