2013 GEO Conference: (Dis)realities and the Literary and Cultural Imagination

Last week's GEO Conference, (Dis)realities and the Literary and Cultural Imagination, was a wild success, with enthusiastic participants, compelling papers, and generous intellectual exchange.

This year's program featured an extraordinarily broad cross-section of the mid-Atlantic graduate student community, with participants from NYU, UVa, and everywhere in between, a testament to the success and reputation of our annual conference. GEO and especially Sarah Bonnie and Uchechi Okereke (the co-organizers of the conference) did an extraordinary job, selecting panels and papers that suggested the potent genealogies of (dis)reality across so many literary periods and genres. The papers were excellent, sessions were on time, and the food wonderful! It was also a treat to hear the work of so many MFA students, whose creative work added a perspective so often missing from academic conferences.

Thanks also to the plenary speakers, Maud Casey, Faedra Carpenter, Matt Kirschenbaum, Vessela Valiavitcharska and Christina Hanhardt for their great talks, performances and readings. Cheers on a job well done!