Southwest English Symposium 2019
The Southwest English Symposium (SWES) is a regional humanities conference held annually at Arizona State University. The conference provides graduate and advanced undergraduate students with an opportunity to present original scholarship before an interdisciplinary audience.
The theme for the 24th Southwest English Symposium is "Borders and Cross-Cultural Encounters." Topics to be explored at the symposium include:
● Immigration, migration, and diaspora
● Interdisciplinary studies
● Genre, narrative theory, and their nuances and flexibility
● Analog and digital borders
● Science and the humanities
● International capitalism, nationalism, and nativism
● Cosmopolitanism, transatlantic studies, and expatriation
● Tourism and the travel memoir
● Translation and adaptation studies
● National borders and map-making
● Life, death, and the afterlife
● Animal studies
● Posthumanism
Though this is an "English" conference, our theme and interest in interdisciplinary work means we will be covering research areas like film and media studies; rhetoric, composition and technical writing; communications and journalism; religious studies, history, and geography; anthropology and folklore studies; sociology and psychology; foreign languages and literature; and fine and performative art.
The symposium's keynote speaker is Dr. Chris Lippard of the University of Utah. A special guest speaker is James E. Garcia, playwright.
The Southwest English Symposium is hosted by the Graduate Scholars of English Association (GSEA) with support from the Department of English.