A Graduate and Early Career Conference
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
Friday, April 15, 2016

We invite paper proposals for Discipline and Excess, a conference which seeks to consider questions relating to boundaries and their transgression until 1750. The theme invites diverse interpretations of “discipline”—moral, religious, cultural, aesthetic, generic, geographic—in papers which explore the realms of penance and perfection, challenge the orderliness implicit in systems of knowledge, or examine the nature of punishment and retribution.

The conference is aimed at early career scholars and graduate students from a range of academic fields. Discipline and Excess is organized by the M.Phil programs in Medieval, Renaissance, and 18th-Century Literature at the Faculty of English. Our external respondent will be Dr. Helen Barr, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford.

Papers should be a maximum of 20 minutes. Please email 250-word abstracts (text only, no attachments) by 1st February 2016 to disciplineandexcess2016@gmail.com.

Possible topics may include:

Crime and Punishment
Bounds of the Mind
Feast and Fast
Disciplining the Body
Exceeding the Page
Intertextuality
Sin, Play, Transgression
Rhetorical Limits
Disciplinary Boundaries