Participants may register for their chosen seminar simply by sending an email to tseliotsociety@gmail.com (please put “peer seminar” in the subject line) by Monday, August 19. The seminars do have a size limit and are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual Prize: Each year the Society awards a prize, sponsored by the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, to the best seminar paper written by an early-career scholar. Graduate students and recent PhDs are eligible (degree received within the past four years for those not yet employed in a tenure-track position; the past two years for those holding tenure-track positions).
Here are a few further notes and suggestions from our Peer Seminar Leaders:
Patrick Query: “The Uses of Eliot”
Let’s put Eliot to work. Who needs to read Eliot today and why? What is the contemporary utility of Eliot’s works and ideas? This seminar will ask what we should draw from Eliot’s life and writing in light of the challenges we face: in culture, in politics, in art, in the academy, in the street. Why do you read Eliot? Why should others? How can his work help us with a current predicament? What does Eliot have to say to us about, for instance:
- the fascist creep
- the natural world, especially oceans and rivers
- borders and migration
- finances, markets, inequality, and the global economy,
- the idea of Europe, the commodification of attention and identities,
- Artificial Intelligence
- Education and the Humanities,
- Wars new and old
- Nationalism
Megan Quigley & Kamran Javadizadeh: “Eliot and Epistolarity”
What are Eliot’s letters like? And how does his epistolary mode (the style, figures, and rhetorical strategies we find in his letters) make itself present in his poems, criticism, and drama? The opening of the Emily Hale correspondence has introduced a rich new archive into Eliot studies. This seminar invites papers that directly address those (or other) letters, as well as papers that think about the role of epistolarity in Eliot’s work more broadly.
a note on how Peer Seminars work:
Peer Seminars are fairly small (c. 12 people in each seminar). Participants pre-circulate short position papers (c.5-6 pages) by Monday, September 2nd. You will hear from your seminar leader sometime prior to that date, with information about where and in what form to share your paper with the leader and the other seminar participants. In the seminars themselves, you’ll be discussing each other’s work as well as Eliot’s poetry and prose, making connections between your shared areas of interest and your own works-in-progress. You will be asked to read all of the short papers of your fellow seminar participants before the start of the conference and to come prepared with questions and suggestions based on your readings. The seminars will meet on the morning of the first day of the conference (Friday, September 20th).
