UP NEXT | AU SUIVANT

April 11-12, 2025

“Quelle honte si vous échouez ! et même combien peu de gloire dans le succès !” proclaims the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons dangereuses. As in many of her letters, the Marquise confronts desire, ambition, and, most importantly, the question of risk. While her comment is in reference to a romantic rivalry, the Marquise touches on a universal truth. Hers is a warning to our future selves, that our work may fail, that our triumphs may be less than triumphant. Two and a half centuries later, we find ourselves now in a Beckettian register, concluding that despite our circumstances, “...il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer.” In the midst of growing university austerity and myriad methodological crises, we wonder what our disciplines will look like in the years to come. Which events, works of art, and methodologies are still relevant? Looking ahead, our question is: who, or what, is up next? 

In our search for what’s next, our responses must look to the past as much as the future. The work we do is shaped by the traditions we inherit, but ultimately we decide how to embrace, adapt, or discard these traditions. In a world threatened by state-sanctioned violence, environmental catastrophe, and an ascendant far right, such questions are fundamentally political. Any response requires engagement with the worlds beyond our disciplinary silos, with all the risk that entails. As such, Equinoxes 2025, “Up Next,” looks towards new horizons in reading, critique, scholarship, and teaching. As a graduate student conference, we are particularly interested in the future of our disciplines and the directions in which our generation of scholars will take our respective fields.

An interdisciplinary conference, we encourage submissions from a variety of fields including but not limited to literature, philosophy, history, women’s and gender studies, performance studies, media studies, anthropology, art history, disability studies, and political science. Papers should be related to French & Francophone studies, broadly defined.

FLUID ENCOUNTERS | RENCONTRES FLUIDES

April 19-20, 2024

In Sylvie Germain's 1985 novel, Le Livre des Nuits, bodily fluids serve as potent metaphors for the transmission of trauma from parent to child. Tears, milk, and blood become powerful symbols of familial relations. The exchange of bodily fluids has long represented human relationships, where substances like breastmilk, saliva, and sexual fluids metonymically represent the bodies they originate from and the relationships they form and sustain.

Fluids thus serve as reminders of a body’s permeability, of its fallibility. The body is not a perfectly closed system, but one that is in flux, one that exceeds its own seemingly fixed boundaries. Fluids also offer duality, for bodies can be nourished by an exchange of fluids just as easily as they can be harmed by one; bodies can be made clean by fluids, just as easily as they can be dirtied by them. Porters of nutrition and of contagion, fluids are paradoxical, transitory, and essential. As a critical framework, fluidity invites us to consider the paradoxes, liminalities, and boundaries of our world.

This conference aims to interrogate and engage with fluids as objects of study and fluidity as a theoretical framework. We invite exploration of fluids in their materiality and fluidity as a framework that deconstructs and subverts. We seek answers to questions such as: How fluid are our representations of self and others? What transformations and convergences occur when bodies (of all kinds) interact? Which states of matter matter when negotiating identity and environment? Bodies release various substances—liquids, solids, gasses—that are registered in multisensorial ways. And our sensory perceptions, from smelling another's perfume to hearing their voice, play a vital role in shaping our understanding of the world. We invite papers engaging with the role of the senses in bodily interactions and multisensorial environments.

As The Sensory Studies Manifesto states, “The senses are everywhere. They mediate the relationship between idea and object, mind and body, self and society, culture and environment” (13). This conference encourages exploration of these mediations and promotes a fluid, moving, and decentered approach to thinking gender, bodies, environments, literary genres, and sensory experiences.

As an interdisciplinary conference, Equinoxes encourages submission from a variety of fields, including but not limited to literature, philosophy, history, ethnography, anthropology, media studies, sensory studies, disability studies, sociology, art history, religious studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, and political science, provided that the presentation relate to French or Francophone studies.