Deadline for Proposals: January 05, 2019
Call for Papers: “Migrations of Cultures”: An Undergraduate Conference in the Modern Languages
University of Pittsburgh March 22-23, 2019
Share your research with other undergraduate students! Get real feedback on a paper! Gain conference experience for work or graduate school! Interested? Then send an abstract to a biannual undergraduate research conference hosted by the Modern Languages Departments at the University of Pittsburgh on March 22-23, 2019. Abstracts should be sent to mecchia@pitt.edu by January 5, 2019.
The papers should address the concept of cultural migrations in the broadest sense of the term, that is, immigrations and emigrations in real and virtual spaces linked to the movements of people(s), language(s) and culture(s). We are looking for multiple disciplinary, geographic, and historical perspectives on the conflicts and opportunities created by the shifting flows of populations, languages and cultural traditions throughout the ages and in the contemporary world. The language of the conference is English but we welcome papers addressing Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish languages and cultures.
Our keynote speaker will be Dr Katelyn Knox, Asst. Professor of French at the University of Central Arkansas, author of Race on Display in 20th and 21st Century France (University of Liverpool Press, 2016). Topics could include:
- Multilingual societies and their conflicts (“language wars”) and advantages
- Linguistic landscapes and their evolution
- Translation as a political tool
- Literatures of the diaspora
- Circulation of texts through multiple areas and in multiple languages
- Travel literature through the ages
- Exiles, migrants, and refugees
- Processes of acculturation
- The politics of cultural production
- Films and the problems of cultural translation
Papers should be twenty minutes long. Papers will be selected by a selection committee staffed by undergraduates from the University of Pittsburgh. Students who submit abstracts will be notified about acceptance by January 20 2019. All inquiries can be directed to Prof. Giuseppina Mecchia, at mecchia@pitt.edu. Limited travel subsidies will be available!