The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Liberal Arts (CIRLA) is hosting a conference in May of 2002. The theme chosen for this year's conference is prompted by the site in which the conference is being held -- Banff National Park -- and its association with "wilderness" and the "wild" (disappearing or otherwise). The broad theme of the invites exploration and reflection on the many usages and meanings of this concept, in historical, political, geographical, environmental, institutional, artistic, and cultural terms. This conference intends to draw together literal and metaphorical ideas about wildness into an interdisciplinary investigation.

Keynote Speakers include Max Oelschlaeger, author of The Idea of Wilderness, and David Rothenberg, co-editor of The World and The Wild and many other works, and jazz clarinetist.

Papers could include the following themes or starting points:

• Wild Mind/Wild Bodies
• Marking/Mapping the Wild: Geography, Politics, Institutions
• Seeing/Representing/Displaying the Wild
• Wild History, or the Wild in History
• Wild Life, Wild Lives
• Memories and Anticipations of Wilderness
• Wild Ideas: What's Left To Explore?
• Call of the Wild: Place, Territory, Terrain, Milieu
• Interdisciplinarity: Academic Wild(er)ness?
• Wild and Free: Liberal Education on the Edge of Respectability
• Wild Goose Chase: Defining Wilderness
• Hinterlands: Boundaries of Space and Knowledge
• Wild(er)ness in the Urban and the Rural
• Is anything wild anymore?