Where: Royce Hall 308

When: November 13-14, 2023

Join the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies’ 3rd Annual Graduate Student Conference: “Speculative Futurities, Past and Present.”

Register Here

View the program (PDF).

The graduate students of the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles are inviting submissions to the third annual ELTS Graduate Student Conference. Our keynote speakers will be Prof. Lydie Moudileno (University of Southern California) and Prof. David Bates (University of California, Berkeley).

Amir Eshel’s Futurity suggests that literary representations of the past are not only key to understanding our present, but they also allow us to set the stage for the future, to improve our understanding of its stakes. Our conference expands on this mode of thinking by reconsidering the ways in which time and space have been and are currently imagined in connection to the European continent and its transnational legacies. What does it mean to speculate on and envision “futurity,” or the lack thereof? Who holds the keys to imagining, conceptualizing, and identifying the future, and who is seen as even having one?