The Comparative Literature Intra-Student Faculty Forum(CLIFF) is an annual conference sponsored by the graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature. CLIFF is designed to promote increased awareness of research being conducted in various languages and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Michigan.

Call for papers for the annual Comparative Literature graduate student conference at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. The conference dates are March 25-27, 2010. Submissions deadline for 300-word abstracts is December 1, 2009. Please send all submissions and questions to 2010cliff@gmail.com 

CALL FOR PAPERS

14th annual Comparative Literature Intra-Student Faculty Forum (CLIFF) March 25-27, 2010 University of Michigan- Ann Arbor

Keynote speaker:

CARY WOLFE

Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English Rice University-Houston, TX

ANIMALITIES

Perhaps no other category of beings has been used to generate kinship and otherness with equal conflicting tension in relation to humans than animals. While contemporary research in biology progressively confirms physiological and behavioral similarities between the two, it is often more revealing to note the divergent but always available criteria--such as anima, sentience, intelligence, and language--used through different periods to connote a persistent distinction between humans and animals. Some of the questions this conference is interested in exploring include: How has the notion of the animal shifted in different time periods? What does it mean for us to represent animals? In what ways do zoological representations illuminate the human-animal rapport aesthetically and ethically? More broadly, how could we theorize the human-animal rapport? How has it remained static? What roles then do animals or conceptions of animals play in different academic disciplines? This year's CLIFF conference provides the opportunity to examine a range of questions surrounding the animal. Ideally, the conference will also be a forum to assess the potential implications of animal studies as an emerging interdisciplinary field.

300-word abstracts for 15-minute paper presentations due:

DECEMBER 1st 2009

All submissions and questions should be addressed to: 2010CLIFF@GMAIL.COM

We invite papers from the following disciplines:

-Literature

-Continental and analytic Philosophy

-Sociology

-History

-Anthropology

-Art History and Visual Studies

-Film Studies

-History of Science

-Philosophy of Science

-Posthumanist Studies

-Law

-Political Science

-Environmental and Ecological Studies

-Biology

-Classics

-Economics

-Medieval Studies

-Queer and Gender Studies