Skepsi, a postgraduate-run journal within the School of European Culture and Languages (SECL), are organising an interdisciplinary conference entitled ‘Wandering and Home’, to be held on 25 May 2018. The editors are currently seeking 300-abstract proposals for presentations at the event.

The conference aims to highlight both the binary opposition between the concepts of ‘wandering’ and ‘home’ and the possible interrelations between them.

Many different types of homes and houses can be found in literature: the ‘gothic’ homes depicted in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, the country homes of late-Georgian England that feature in Jane Austen’s novels, and the stifling atmosphere of the late-Victorian and Edwardian upper middle-class London homes of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyth Saga. Their role, in the history of literature, of symbolising family values, social status and the complex web of family relationships is clearly one of great importance.

But wandering is not just a physical activity; there is also mind-wandering, a metaphorical form of wandering taking place in that most intimate and homely dimension of personal space — the human mind. Modernist literature’s stream of consciousness writing functions as the means of exploring these wanderings of the mind that, by opening up multiple perspectives of literary texts, results in a wider understanding of mankind and its character.

For a suggested list to topics, please see the page here.

The conference is open to all disciplines within the Humanities as well as Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Sociology, Politics, Architecture and Visual Arts. Papers coming from an inter-, trans- or multidisciplinary background are particularly welcomed.

Papers should last for 20 minutes and will be followed by a 10-minute discussion.

Abstracts of approx. 300 words should be sent as Word documents to the conference organising committee at skepsi@kent.ac.uk by 31 March 2018. The email should also include the name of the author, institutional affiliation and brief autobiographical details. Please also indicate any audio-visual requirements that you may have.

For further details about Skepsi, please see the page here: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/skepsi/