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 14-16, 2022, will be “The Human on the Margins.” Keynote speakers will be Patricia Vieira, Marisol de la Cadena, and Jerónimo Duarte-Riascos.

Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian societies were constituted by the collision of worlds, perspectives, bodies, objects, species, and subjectivities. The frameworks of these processes range from the so-called “Columbian exchange” in the 15th century, the global spread of diseases, to contemporary migration flows—a long history of circulation, contacts, and displacements. In this conference we invite you to rethink human and non-human relationships in the Hispanic and Lusophone context, broadening our perspectives on the agents of cultural transformation and bringing various periods and lines of thought into conversation. How are the margins between the human and the non-human built? How do different imaginaries approach these junctions? In what ways does this perspective help us rethink different categories, such as race, gender, and class? The many possibilities include the effects of the encounters between objects, living organisms, languages, and knowledge; the epistemological differences between the traditions of the global North and South; the conceptualizations of subject, space, landscape, and territory; the post-human and ecocritical perspectives of the transoceanic, insular, and peninsular worlds; the cultural productions born on the margins.