CFP: Representing and Remembering War
An international conference investigating war, literature, and art at the United States Air Force Academy on September 20-21, 2018 solicits both disciplinary and interdisciplinary presentations on “Representing and Remembering War.” The conference seeks a variety of genre submissions, both critical and creative, including literary criticism, journalism, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, theory, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, film studies, photography, painting, and music. As an international forum on the cultural implications of warfare, the conference is designed to bring together a multitude of perspectives, critical approaches, and discourse communities on the topics of warfare and its representations across all time periods and conflicts. We encourage submissions that illuminate, challenge, deconstruct, engage with, or create not simply the ‘official’ representations of wars, but the sub-cultures that merit a more nuanced or sophisticated intellectual exploration.
Keynote Speakers
Suzan-Lori Parks
Named among Time magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next Wave,” Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most acclaimed playwrights in American drama today. She is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and is a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient. She’s been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also the recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. She and is an alum of New Dramatists and of Mount Holyoke College. Parks’s plays include Topdog/Underdog (2002 Pulitzer Prize winner); The Book of Grace; In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist); Venus (1996 OBIE Award); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World; Fucking A; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 OBIE Award); and The America Play. Her newest plays, Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)—set during the Civil War—was awarded the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama as well as being a 2015 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. Currently performing Watch Me Work, a free weekly writing workshop, open to artists of all disciplines, Parks teaches at New York University, and serves at the Public Theater as its Master Writer Chair.
Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, and he was a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Butler is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University.
Conference Submissions :
Abstracts, 300 words maximum, should include name, e-mail, affiliation, genre, and requirements for audiovisual support, computers, or other technical requirements. Panel submissions welcome (3-4 presenters for each 90 minute panel). Send abstracts in the body of an e-mail or .pdf document to:
Submission window: September 25, 2017 – December 15, 2017.
Acceptance notifications will be sent no later than February 1, 2018.
Conference Directors:
Lt Col Jesse Goolsby, PhD.
Prof Tom McGuire, PhD.
Capt Katie Witt
