In a time of national reckoning with the history of suppressed voices in the United States, this conference is an invitation to rethink narrative, authorship, (presumed and coopted) authority, voice, point of view, persuasion, political discourse, and the general human need to make sense, in the shape of a story, of the seemingly random events that occur every day.

But the question is, quite literally, who tells your story? Do you get to tell it yourself, as memoirist and autobiographer, or is someone else claiming the right to tell or suppress your story? Who is given a hearing? Who is sidelined? Who and what is erased? American history—the story of its storytelling—is, among many other things, also a history of empire, suppression, oppression and dispossession. It is the story of voices silenced, authorship coopted, narratives erased, and unspeakable things remaining unspoken

Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Natasha Tretheway from Northwestern University
Prof. James Phelan from Ohio State University
 
Autres événements dans le cycle

18.11.2022	Keynote Address 1: “Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and the Dance of Rhetorical Reading”
18.11.2022	A Poetry Reading by Prof. Natasha Trethewey
19.11.2022	Keynote Address 2: ‘You Are Not Safe in Science, You Are Not Safe in History’: On Abiding Metaphors and Finding a Calling.”