CFP: [20th] Exposure: Literature, Epidemiology, Risk (ACLA 11/15/07; 4/24/07-4/27/07

Please submit proposals through the ACLA Conference website. Deadline
11/15/07. http://www.acla.org/acla2008

Seminar Organizers: Daniel Grausam, Washington U in St. Louis and Mitchum Huehls, UCLA

This seminar seeks to engage the conference theme of arrival and departure by asking how
narratives of exposure — to disease, risk, and toxins, broadly conceived — might contribute to a
rethinking of disciplinary locations, identifications, and boundaries. How, for instance, do
patterns of illness and exposure, and their related narratives, destabilize the borders, areas of
expertise, and historical periods that constitute our academic fields? What threats might they
pose to the idea of the aesthetic? The seminar invites work from any time period(s), genre(s), or
national literature(s), but we are particularly interested in papers that 1) consider the role played
by fiction in representing risk, and 2) consider the relationships between various understandings
of exposure and risk — the epidemiological, the personal, the professional, the cultural, and the
economic — under conditions of globalization. Possible topics include, but are in no way
restricted to: global pandemic, patient(s) zero, the outsourcing of toxicity, security and
bioterrorism, coming plagues, disease vectors, and global biopolitics.

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Received on Mon Nov 12 2007 - 23:23:40 EST