Works of art call out to each other, engaging in conversations that span borders and epochs. From the circulation of written
works within salon culture to the power of images to capture a movement, how might we understand our interactions with
media and each other as conversations centered around and facilitated by bodies? Bodies continue to be a site of political
struggle, from the policing of race, gender, and reproduction to the increasing awareness of our own environmental
entanglements. What might we learn from listening to and/or reading bodies, in their various material representations?
Papers may address the following topics: the construction of a corpus, the relationship between text and criticism, issues of
voice, how bodies speak for themselves, the legibility of a body as racialized, gendered, and/or disabled, the afterlife of a
work of art, the legacy of creative traditions, the construction of archives, and texts as living documents. Finally, how might
our own interventions be understood as corporeal conversations in their own right?
As an interdisciplinary conference, Equinoxes encourages submission from a variety of fields, including but not limited to
literature, philosophy, history, ethnography, anthropology, media studies, disability studies, sociology, art history, religious
studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and political science, provided that the presentation relate to French or Francophone
studies.
We welcome papers related (but not limited) to the following topics:
● Bodies of work
● Theories of the corpus and canonicity
● Posthumous publishing
● Editorial processes
● Archive(s)
● Palimpsests
● Criticism of theory and praxis
● The works of Michel de Montaigne
● Autobiography / Autofiction / Autotheory
● Networks of communication and writing
● Written or recorded conversations
● Voices and the voiceless
● Survival, testimony and inheritance
● Death, mourning and remains
● Embodiment
● The sensing body
● Body and voice
● Body language
● Disability
● Gendered bodies / (Wo)man and the body
● Corporeal Feminism
● Women’s writing / écriture féminine
● Rhetoric and Speech Acts
● Worldbuilding / Worlds from words
Graduate students who wish to participate in the conference should submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, along
with a short bio. Abstracts must be sent, as attachments, to equinoxes-conference@brown.edu before December 31, 2022.
Emails should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Presentations, whether in English
or in French, should not exceed 20 minutes.