The Graduate Students of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (SLLC) will be holding the 5th annual Maryland Graduate Student Forum on the 23rd and 24th of February, 2007. Our purpose is to foster innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship and to disseminate that new knowledge to as wide an audience as possible. In light of the importance of work which transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, we have chosen "Text as History and History as Text" as the topic of this conference.
At the forefront of literary/cultural scholarship today stands the reevaluation of texts, which challenges their role as apolitical aesthetic works and redefines them as products of their representative cultures. Furthermore, we recognize a new concept of "text" which includes, but is not limited to: architecture, various media of speech, films, the fine arts, official documents and dialects.
We are currently seeking papers that explore this new understanding of texts as well as their relationship to culture, society and history. Should you be interested in submitting an abstract, please email it to: mgsforum@gmail.com.