The 2017 Concordia English Graduate Colloquium is presently seeking editors for our 15th annual conference and inaugural volume of conference proceedings.

This position offers an opportunity to earn valuable experience editing academic and hybrid papers on a variety of subjects relating to this year’s conference theme: “The Sincerest form of Flattery.” Working closely alongside the authors of the work, editors will hone their critical and analytic skills in order to polish papers for both presentation and publication. The responsibilities of the editor include: verifying citations and facts; editing papers for content; copyediting papers for publication; ensuring that papers conform to the MLA style selected for the volume of conference proceedings; and working in collaboration with the editorial team, organizing committee, and the authors themselves. Editors will also have the opportunity to chair panels at the conference from March 17-18, 2016.

Priority will be awarded to graduate students in Concordia’s Department of English. Individuals concurrently submitting papers are welcome to apply, and will simply not be asked to work on their own papers.

Please submit a brief paragraph of intent and a CV to concordiacolloquium@gmail.com by February 3, 2017.

We are thrilled to announce that the Concordia English Graduate Colloquium’s 2017 keynote speaker is Hannah McGregor.

Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor in Publishing at Simon Fraser University. Her research and teaching interests address the histories and futures of print culture and new media in Canada, with a focus on Canadian middlebrow magazines, and podcasting as both self-publishing and public pedagogy.

McGregor completed her PhD at TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph in 2013, and her research focused on contemporary white Canadian women’s representations of distant suffering. She held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta, where her project, “Modern Magazines Project Canada,” examined magazines as a form of new media technology responsible for shaping the twentieth century consumer-publics.

She also received a SSHRC Connection grant for “Magazines and/as Media: Methodological Challenges in Periodical Studies” with Paul Hjartarson and Faye Hammill. Papers from this workshop can be found in special issues of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 6.2 and English Studies in Canada 41.1.

Alongside Marcelle Kosman, McGregor also creates Witch, Please, a fortnightly podcast about the Harry Potter world. They have shared their public pedagogy and its relationship to fandom on numerous platforms, including CBC Edmonton AM, the Edmonton Journal, Ravishly, and at fan expos around Canada.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

March 17 | March 18 |  2017

“When you write a story, you only have to write one story, but there will always be people who will refuse to read the story you have written” -Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”

At what point can a piece of literature be truly considered complete? What is the lifespan of a literary world and its inhabitants? What is the role of adaptations, so-called fan art and fanfiction? What is the role of a scribe or a fan author? Upon whose shoulders does the responsibility of keeping a work alive lie? In a world in which the audience demands a voice, how do storytellers adapt to, collaborate, and work with those on the other side of the page?

Imitation has, itself, become an art form. The 15th annual Concordia University English Graduate Colloquium aims to explore this art in all of its myriad forms. As such, we are calling for academic and hybrid submissions that engage with the contemporary culture of audience engagement vis-à-vis English literature – papers that engage with questions of authorship, fandom, adaptation, transmedia, interpretation, and interactivity.

We welcome papers on the following range of subjects and related themes:

• Fan created content (Fanfiction, fanart, etc.)
• Fandom as a cultural practice
• Fan spaces (Fanfiction archives, conventions, message boards, etc.)
• Transmedia literature
• Cross-culture adaptations and translations
• Collaborative & interactive storytelling
• Authorship & Ownership
• Restoration & Modernization
• Re-interpretation as subversion
• Satire
• Literary Criticism

To celebrate our 15th anniversary, we will be launching our first annual Conference Proceedings, publishing a score of papers to preserve a record of the event and encourage further exploration into your research. As such, we are asking you to submit 2,500 word papers rather than proposals in order to make the inaugural publication as strong as it can be.

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, January 15th 2017 by Midnight (12:00 AM)

Papers should be submitted to concordiacolloquium@gmail.com  and should not exceed 2500 words. Presentations will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Creative and hybrid proposals should address how the piece(s) engage(s) with the theme. Further questions can be directed to concordiacolloquium@gmail.com

We welcome submissions from anywhere in Canada and abroad, regardless of institution or discipline. We accept multiple submissions by one author, with the understanding that the strongest among them will be chosen for the colloquium. Papers will be judged on the strength of their content and the success with which they engage with the theme.

We look forward to reading your submissions!

Click here to view the 2016 Concordia English Graduate Colloquium schedule

Print copies will be available at registration.