Past Event

Producing the Archive is the first Carleton English Graduate Studies Society (EGSS) conference. The conference is organized by graduate students from the Department of English Language and Literature, and it features graduate students from various institutions in North America.

Our theme, “Producing the Archive,” engages with Carleton’s PhD program The Production of Literature,  which focuses on developing the tools necessary to understand, analyze, and critique the varied means through which literature is produced and maintained. As a growing area of interest in numerous fields, the archive is becoming increasingly central to the program as the site where history is crafted and manipulated. In choosing this theme, we asked that submissions engage with the many faces of the archive – as a space of power and empowerment, control and subversion, unification and destruction. As a result, the conference will feature exciting talks on the archive in its many forms and contexts, spanning topics such as digital humanities, genre, nationalism, and dystopia.

The conference will kick off on Wednesday the 28^th with a keynote presentation from the distinguished Professor Donald Beecher, who is celebrating his 50^th anniversary at Carleton. Dr. Beecher is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada whose research has addressed many aspects of the development of English Literature, including early plays, folk tales, and the role of the cognitive sciences in analyzing texts. Dr. Beecher’s lecture entitled “From Orality to Archive: Capturing the Stream of Story” will explore the archive’s capacity to preserve oral culture, and how such translation affects oral storytelling.

Conference events will be held in the Department of English, on the 18th floor of Dunton Tower. We invite and encourage members of the English department and greater Carleton community to attend this free event. Spectating and participating in discussion is both open to the public and encouraged.

Interested parties can check our website for the conference program and information on the presenter panels. We would like to thank the Department of English Language and Literature, the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs, The School of Journalism and Communications, the School for Studies in Art and Culture, and the Department of History for their support.