Welcome

The Chicago Graduate Conference is an annual conference organized by Spanish and Luso-Brazilian literature graduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago. Previously, all three universities had hosted separate graduate student conferences. However, for the past six years, these three programs have come together for the purpose of putting on an intellectual gathering at a grander scale, pooling resources, and working collaboratively in order to provide the best possible opportunity for graduate students in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies to share their work, network, and learn from their peers.

We are pleased to announce that the theme for this year’s conference, in remote format at the University of Chicago, on April 19-21, 2023, will be “Speculative Futures” Keynote speakers will be Alex Saum-Pascual, Sarah West, Marquis Bey and Gabriel Giorgi.

More than half a century ago, mohawk punks and nihilists predicted: "There is no future". But today we witness the creation of speculative futures that allow us to imagine alternative forms of being, of knowledge and of human and non-human life. These futures —sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes utopian— confront historical realities and problematize hegemonic structures, histories of colonialism, racism and sexism. Speculative futures are at the heart of the humanities, even as we discuss past ideas of futures. Since pre-modern times the imagination of the future has been central to social and political practices (Peter Burke), and the possibilities of the future have liberated and destabilized entire societies.

In this conference we invite you to think about the idea of the future in the Hispanic and Lusophone context and to trace points of encounter between the imagination of the premodern future and the present day. How do premodern speculative media, such as prophecy, theorize the future? In what ways do speculative futures allow us to confront crises? Are speculative narratives counter-hegemonic texts? What kind of future(s) have been, are, or will be narrated? How have nation-building projects contributed to the imagination of the future?