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By Jill Barnum, Program Chair |
Conference Overview (Downloadable Program) / (Downloadable Last-Minute Program Changes):
Robert Olen Butler* Herbert Martin The program for the 34th annual conference of CEA, meeting in St. Petersburg, FL, 3-5 April 2003, is in place. Sixty-seven lively panels, on a wide-range of literatures and teaching, address peace and war, terror and recovery—the legacy of picking up the pieces in a transformed age.
I am particularly thrilled to announce our conference speakers. The Conference Opening Plenary will feature Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer-prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Tabloid Dreams, and other evocative works on peace and war in the United States and in Southeast Asia.
The All-Conference Luncheon will feature Herbert Woodward Martin, performance artist and scholar, whose work on Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Middle Passage, and the Log of the Vigilante is legendary.
Sessions and Panels:Our program includes both traditional and innovative features. LarryRubin, who will again coordinate the Traditional Poetry Workshop, invites participants to bring with them 10 copies of their poems for a reading and a collegial critique. This session will be complemented by three Creative Writing panels chaired by Rolando Hinojosa-Smith (prose), Courtney Judith Ruffner (poetry), and Barbara Wiedemann (prose and poetry).Richard Adicks has arranged a panel on Electronic Books, and Wendell Aycock has organized one panel of Panamanian students analyzing literature written in English and a second panel with Panamanian faculty speaking about the Panamanian M.A. in contemporary literature. Our slate of presenters also includes people from Coimbra, Portugal, the University of Glasgow, and Nehru, India.John Shawcross will give us a new look at authors and works with "Text and Context, and Something about Place." There are sessions on Flannery O'Connor, Stephen Crane, and Ernest Hemingway in Florida. Marina Favila has organized a panel of graduate students analyzing Renaissance drama. Especially consistent with the conference theme about rethinking our research and curricula post-9/11 are a panel entitled "Peace Matters," about war literature and neutrality in the classroom, and another panel, "The Lesson of 9/11: Terrorize the Academy," a mandate to teach cultural differences and the rhetoric surrounding them.Eleanor Green has organized the President's Forum around the topic "Marketing the English Major." The Traditional Diversity Luncheon and Diversity Panel are scheduled, as are three panels sponsored by NYCEA on Law and Literature and four panels sponsored by FCEA, one of which highlights the literature of Florida. SEA at CEA this year focuses on the work of Herman Melville in three sessions, which feature Melville scholars Douglas Robillard, Elizabeth Renker, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Sanford Marovitz.New on the program this year are two sessions organized by Dean Baldwin and Ned Laff for The Association of Advisors of English. The Women's Connection will be especially visable this year with seven panels put together by Ann Hawkins and Jeri Kraver.
Following the Women's Connection Reception on Friday night, the United States Naval Academy Masqueraders will treat us to an original dramatic production, "Saints Joan: Shaw, Shakespeare, and Sequels." The Traditional Book Drawing immediately precedes the All-Conference Luncheon.
See YOU in sunny St. Pete!Jill Barnum
[Note: Butler photo by Bill Langford. Calls for papers for the Conference were available at <conf_2003.htm>.
