CALL FOR PAPERS
UP NEXT | AU SUIVANT
April 11-12, 2025
Brown University, Department of French and Francophone Studies | Providence, Rhode Island
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Marie W. Larose
Assistant Professor, Dept. of French & Italian, Dartmouth College

“Quelle honte si vous échouez ! et même combien peu de gloire dans le succès !” proclaims the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons dangereuses. As in many of her letters, the Marquise confronts desire, ambition, and, most importantly, the question of risk. While her comment is in reference to a romantic rivalry, the Marquise touches on a universal truth. Hers is a warning to our future selves, that our work may fail, that our triumphs may be less than triumphant. Two and a half centuries later, we find ourselves now in a Beckettian register, concluding that despite our circumstances, “…il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer.” In the midst of growing university austerity and myriad methodological crises, we wonder what our disciplines will look like in the years to come. Which events, works of art, and methodologies are still relevant? Looking ahead, our question is: who, or what, is up next?

In our search for what’s next, our responses must look to the past as much as the future. The work we do is shaped by the traditions we inherit, but ultimately we decide how to embrace, adapt, or discard these traditions. In a world threatened by state-sanctioned violence, environmental catastrophe, and an ascendant far right, such questions are fundamentally political. Any response requires engagement with the worlds beyond our disciplinary silos, with all the risk that entails. As such, Equinoxes 2025, “Up Next,” looks towards new horizons in reading, critique, scholarship, and teaching. As a graduate student conference, we are particularly interested in the future of our disciplines and the directions in which our generation of scholars will take our respective fields.

An interdisciplinary conference, we encourage submissions from a variety of fields including but not limited to literature, philosophy, history, women’s and gender studies, performance studies, media studies, anthropology, art history, disability studies, and political science. Papers should be related to French & Francophone studies, broadly defined.

We welcome papers related (but not limited) to the following topics:
The future of literature, art, film, or humanistic study
Futurity, time, and temporality
Canonical literature and its (d)evolution
Trends in narrative, genre, style
Generations, genealogy, and inheritance
Filiation and affiliation
Revolutions, schisms, ruptures
Fallout, extinction, survival
Critical responsibility and reverence
Changing conditions of teaching, scholarship, and technology
New and old theoretical frameworks
The state of the discipline(s)
Adaption
Intermediality
Intersectionality
Bricolage

Graduate students who wish to participate in the conference should submit an abstract of no more than 200 words, along with a short bio. Abstracts must be sent as attachments to [email protected] by January 3, 2025. Emails should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Presentations, in English or in French, should not exceed 20 minutes.