The Anxiety Order

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Wilson College Humanities Conference

 The Anxiety Order

 Saturday, February 24, 2018
10:00am-5:00pm

Held in the Brooks Complex of Wilson College

Chambersburg, PA

 sponsored by Wilson’s M.A. in Humanities Program

The theme of this year’s Wilson College Orr Forum is concerned with anxiety. Though we are accustomed to think of anxiety as a disorder, anxiety appears to be the new order of the day. We live in a near-constant state of anxiety, feeling anxious at school and work, in social settings and at home, and about all sorts of things, including our relationships, the future, politics, and the ultimate fate of Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. Globally, anxiety is fueling nationalistic politics not witnessed in generations. Nationally, today’s generation of young people is thought to be the most anxious on record. On a more micro-level, I don’t know about you, but some days I just don’t want to get out of bed.

This conference looks to how the various fields represented by the Humanities explore our own relationship to this concept of Anxiety. We are seeking exploratory, critical, and creative responses to what increasingly feels like a new—and altogether more anxious—normal. How can we use the Humanities to make sense of what seems to be fuelling so much of our national (and international) consternation? How has Anxiety manifested in the past? How does it in the present? What does our study of text, of art, of ideas, of religion, and of each other tell us about living in such anxious times?

What does it mean if something makes us anxious? What does it mean to “feel” anxiety over a work of art, or an idea, or a book, or a movement, or a moment? What is the appropriate response? How have people handled this in the past? How do we interrogate a subject as broad as anxiety from a humanities-based perspective?

Please feel free to interpret the theme of this conference liberally. Our goal is to bring a group of Humanities students and scholars from around the region together to articulate, understand, and explore those things that make us nervous, and queasy, and how we do respond and have responded to such feelings.

Faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars are all invited to submit.

Undergraduate students may also submit abstracts, but their submission must include a letter of support from a current faculty member at their institution. (For more on this, please contact the conference director.)

To submit a presentation, please send an abstract of approximately 200 words to the email address below.

Send abstracts to:

Dr. Michael G. Cornelius
Program Director, MA in Humanities
Wilson College
[email protected]

Submit the abstract as either a .rtf, .doc, or .docx file, or simply place it into the text of the email itself.

Individual presentations will last no more than 15 minutes; panels of up to 3 individuals may be submitted as well. Special panels or creative approaches are happily considered; please contact the conference director for more information. Each conference participant may submit only one abstract. Abstracts are due by JANUARY 15, 2018.

The conference is sponsored by Wilson’s M.A. in Humanities program, in conjunction with the Orr Forum 2017-18 Common Hour and Lecture and Performance Series.