CEA 2010: Voices

March 25–27, 2010 San Antonio, Texas

“And in my voice most welcome shall you be.” As You Like It 2:4.87

Program available in Word and PDF

Registration and travel information available here

All participants must be members of CEA - join here

San Antonio. Images of the River Walk merge with the memories of its most famous location, the Alamo. Remember it, the voices from the past call out, and we do.

Those voices on opposing sides of its walls, representing Santa Anna and Sam Houston, spoke for two distinctly diverse cultures. And within those cultures were voices and texts that influenced the actions during that struggle—significant cultural markers of time, place, and being.

Before and after the struggle there, writers everywhere have reflected and influenced the events of their day, and from their experience, the great writers have created texts that have become ageless connections to what is past , or passing, or to come.

Their voices also call for us to acknowledge or recognize beauty or to realize or remember significant lessons -- perhaps via a character like Professor Farber from Fahrenheit 451 or a place like a raft on a river in Huckleberry Finn—with an urgency no less than the Alamo's. This correspondence we find within ourselves is our human condition—but it is the capacity to listen for and to those whose message or memory is unlike our own that makes us scholars. Our voices blend with those we admire or abhor—creating a text, which (if it stands the test of taste and time) will blend with still other voices, like those of our students, newly discovering “a peak in Darien”—all wishing to be heard and remembered.

Special Events

**CORRECTION** ~ The Affiliates' Breakfast is scheduled for Saturday, March 27, 7-8:15 a.m., Ludwig's in Sheraton Gunter (not on Friday morning as noted on the registration form)

Plenary: Thursday, March 25

Geshe Thupten Dorjee and Professor Sidney Burris, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, "Visual Narratives: Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy in Exile"

Geshe Dorjee was born in Tibet and escaped in 1959 with his family when the Dalai Lama fled to India.  Spending his early years in a refugee camp in Bhutan, Geshe eventually entered Drepung Loseling Monastery in Mundgod, India, where he went on to receive the Geshe Lharampa degree, perhaps the most advanced academic degree in the world.  After traveling around the United States with The Mystical Arts of Tibet , he finally settled in Alabama.  He met Professor Burris in Toronto in 2004 at a teaching given by the Dalai Lama, and Professor Burris brought him to our campus in 2007 where he has become one of the University's most popular teachers.

Professor Burris received his BA in Classical Studies at Duke University and his MA and Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia.  Studying Sanskrit at Virginia in 1979, Professor Burris was given an opportunity to hear His Holiness speak in Charlottesville during his first trip to America, and he has been a student of Tibetan culture and philosophy since that time.  Professor Burris is a Professor of English and Director of The Fulbright College Honors Program .  He also runs the blog site, TIBETSPACE .

Diversity Luncheon: Friday, March 26

Naomi Shihab Nye, "Merci & Shookrun: Bounty of a Beautiful World (Some Thoughts on Reading and Writing from a Wandering Poet)"

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, lived in Jerusalem, her father's home, as a teen, and currently lives in old downtown San Antonio with her husband, photographer Michael Nye (his show on hunger is currently up at the Witte Museum if you get a chance to pass by there.) Recently named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Nye has written or edited 30 books -- poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and children's books -- and has been a visiting writer since her graduation from Trinity University.

Women's Connection: Friday, March 26

Norma Cantu, "De aqui de este lado: Chicana Border Writers"

All-Conference Luncheon : Saturday, March 27

Dr. Jason Hall, University of Exeter, Cornwall, "Versification and the Voice: Some Curious Metrical Histories

Jason Hall is Undergraduate Programme Leader for English on the University of Exeter's Cornwall Campus. He has written widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and versification. He is the author of Seamus Heaney's Rhythmic Contract (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) and co-editor of Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator (Palgrave Macmillan 2007). His essays on Victorian prosody have appeared or are forthcoming in the journals Configurations, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Victorian Poetry. Hall is the editor of the forthcoming Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Ohio UP), and his next book, from which his CEA talk draws, is tentatively titled Promiscuous Feet: A Cultural History of Meter, 1830-1930.

Important Information for Presenters