Conference Overview:

Every year, undergraduates from SFU’s World Literature Program host an interdisciplinary academic student conference addressing cultural, social, and aesthetic frames of reference. Our panels range across literature, cinema, & the image, and investigate the socio-political, cultural, & literary fallouts of cross-national encounters.

The conference is entirely led and orchestrated by a student team. Whilst key members of the team are often drawn from the previous year’s roster, most team members are new to the project. Each fall term, a student board is struck in tandem with the conference project’s host organization, The World Languages & Literatures Student Union. Applications to join the annual production team are made available each January. The Call for Papers is circulated from the beginning of February.  Under the tutelage of the faculty liaison officer, all team members and speakers receive training – production team members from the outset, whilst the Masters of Ceremonies, Panel Moderators, and Speakers receive voice training and rhetorical coaching in March. To a very large extent, the conference project envisions an in-depth process of experiential learning across its various units: coordination and management, academic and curatorial, publicity, artists and graphic designers, and the event-crew house and stage managers, technicians, and conference photographers. The founder of the conference, and its continuing faculty liaison officer and training coordinator, Dr. Mark Deggan (WLL), remains committed to the value of exposing students to all aspects of academic research and communication, not least through the same forum by which university professionals share their work.

Conference Program: