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This year's English Graduate Conference at the University of Oxford seeks to explore the intersections of politics and aesthetics, investigating how literature has always (re)turned to the political. How do literary aesthetics—structure, form, poetics—interact with the political? Is the ‘task’ of literature to engage political discourse? Or does literature have a 'task' at all? In addition, does political engagement in literature necessitate preserving the complexities of literary and aesthetic forms? What is the relationship between textual experimentation and historical and political contexts? How can texts (re)make or influence society, politics, culture, and history?

Award winning author Ben Okri will be giving a keynote address at the conference. (Read more).
The Conference takes place at the English Faculty, at the University of Oxford (directions here).

We welcome submissions from any time period or discipline. Papers should be 20 minutes long. Please submit your name, department, university, title of paper, and a 250-word abstract to by 1 March 2012.

Presentation topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Aesthetics of resistance: art as weapon, censorship, representing collectives;
• Literature and political movements: universal suffrage, civil rights, nation/state formation;
• Aesthetics, genre, and form: propaganda, satire, the novel, genre formation;
• Political language: English as world language, translation, propaganda;
• Literature of the displaced or silenced: diaspora, minorities, globalization;
• Politics of gender and sexuality;
• (Trans)national texts and poetics;
• Authorial contexts;
• Political approaches to literature: feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, and how useful these approaches are for literary criticism.

In addition to four sessions of student presentations, the conference will include a panel discussion on the topic ‘What is a Classic?’, featuring Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, Dr Ankhi Mukherjee (fellow of Wadham College) and Judith Luna (Senior Commissioning Editor, Oxford World's Classics). The conference will conclude with a keynote address from Booker prize winning author Ben Okri. The cost of attendance is £20 for students outside Oxford University, and includes a light breakfast, lunch, refreshments, and a wine reception. There will also be a dinner for those who wish to sign up (an additional cost of £15).

To register, please click here. A method of payment will be made available in the new year; in the mean time you can sign your name up and be notified when payment is opened.

Please contact with any further enquiries.

We look forward to receiving your submission!

About the English Graduate Conference: every year the English Faculty at Oxford University hosts a graduate conference for post-graduate students in the field of English Literature, or related studies. In the past we have had addresses from award-winning authors like Philip Pullman and Penelope Lively, with papers given by people from all over the world. It is always a lively and stimulating event, and we look forward to welcoming you to it in June.