It’s that time again! This year’s Writing/Image/Text (W.I.T.) Graduate English Symposium will be held on Tuesday May 15 here on the Dobbs Ferry NY campus. May 15, in case it should matter to some of you, is the day before the School of Liberal Arts and the School of Education commencement ceremony. You can read about last year’s symposium here, if you’re interested.

The symposium is a casual mini-conference at which interested MA English students or alumni gather to read aloud a scholarly or creative paper (a paper that you’ve written for any of your MA courses will do just fine, though it must be edited to no longer than 10 pages), as well as to meet some fellow grad students and program professors. Family and friends are welcome to attend too. And MA students interested in attending but not reading aloud a paper are of course welcome to do so. Graduate students and professional scholars often attend and read at local, regional, and national conferences, so this symposium provides a friendly small-scale introduction to the conference experience. And for anyone who reads a paper, it becomes a line-item you can list under the scholarship section on your CV (click here to read more about the CV).

The symposium title “Writing/Image/Text” signals that you don’t have to just focus your presentation on literary analysis, as you traditionally would at an English conference, but might instead present work involving other media, other types of texts.

Anyone interested in attending, and in reading a paper, please let me know by sending a note as soon as possible to cloots@mercy.edu. I need to establish asap who all will attend, how many people will present, and how many overall to expect so that I can reserve the appropriate room space, order the right amount of catering (lunch provided courtesy of the MA program), and establish the necessary time-length for the entire event. Right now I have it as 11:00-3:00 but that could change depending on how many people respond. So please let me know soon, by mid-April at the latest, if you can attend, if you will read a paper, and how many people overall you will be bringing. Contact cloots@mercy.edu for answers to any questions you might have.