Literature by migrants - those not at home where they write - foregrounds many questions concerning cultural and linguistic identity, not least the relationships between identity, language and territory. Fundamentally, such literature challenges the categories according to which literary disciplines have traditionally (that is, since the late nineteenth century) organised their research. This conference on "Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe" aims to bring together scholars researching within this field and to establish or negotiate the sense of a shared discipline with common paradigms and problematics. The conference wishes to explore literature by migrants, and by the children of migrants, as well as literature written by non-migrants that deals with migration as a theme; and to investigate whether and how migration affects national canons, national literary history and national culture in a broad sense. The conference will also welcome papers on other forms of cultural expression: music, the visual and performing arts, and media and language in general. There will also be space for interdisciplinary papers which situate the phenomenon of migration within other discourses, psychological or philosophical, historical or geographical, anthropological or sociological.

Invited speakers will include
Azade Seyhan, Bryn Mawr College, US, Charles Bonn, Université Lumière Lyon 2, FR, Deniz Göktürk, University of California, Berkeley, US, Graziella Parati, Dartmouth College, US, Tom Cheesman, Swansea University, UK and Ulf Hedetoft, Københavns Universitet, DK.

The conference language is English. Submission of proposals: Applications by e-mail -- containing name, institutional address, e-mail address, short CV and 300 word abstract of proposed paper -- should be sent no later than June 15 2007 to: grundtvig@hum.ku.dk. The conference is organized by the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies (http://www.english.engerom.ku.dk) and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen (http://kunstogkulturvidenskab.ku.dk); it is sponsored by 'Europe in Transition', one of the University of Copenhagen's interdisciplinary and faculty-wide research priority areas (http://www.ku.dk/priority/europe).