What is the Imagination?

4th Annual Braniff Conference in the Liberal Arts 

What is the Imagination? 

Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts 

University of Dallas, Irving, TX 

January 26-27, 2018 

Keynote Speaker: Eva Brann, St. John’s College 

Plenary Speaker: Dennis Sepper, University of Dallas 

The Braniff Graduate Student Association of the University of Dallas is pleased to announce the fourth annual Braniff Graduate Conference in the Liberal Arts. This conference aims to explore the nature of the imagination as it has been discussed in the Western tradition. We welcome papers in liberal arts disciplines including—but not limited to—philosophy, literature, politics, theology, history, and psychology, and drawing from the classical, medieval, modern, or contemporary period. 

Relevant topics include but are not limited to: 

- What is the imagination? 

- Imagination as it functions in art: artist, artifact, and audience. 

- Imagination and self-fashioning; imagination and identity. 

- Literary depictions and explorations of the imagination 

- The imagination as a political battleground: propaganda, advertisement, rhetoric, etc. 

- Philosophic inquiry and the imagination 

- Imagination and child development; imagination and education. 

- The image and the word: imagination in the context of language and language arts. 

- Imagination and psychology. 

- Ethics and imagination. 

- Imagination and dystopian literature/post-apocalyptic film. 

- Imagination and the real. 

We invite scholars working in the liberal arts to submit abstracts of no more than 500 words that consider the theme of imagination from the perspective of their discipline, a particular author, or through an interdisciplinary approach. Preference will be given to papers conversant with the great texts of the Western tradition. The conference committee will invite select authors to publish their essays in a special edition of Ramify: The Journal of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts. 

Submit abstracts to [email protected]. Abstracts should be prepared for blind review. Please include a separate cover letter with your name, paper title, email address, and institutional affiliation. 

Abstracts are due no later than November 3, 2017. Presenters will be notified of their acceptance by Tuesday, November 21 and will be asked to submit their full papers, suitable for a 15 minute presentation (no more than 2500 words), by December 31, 2017.