Call for Papers

What are we waiting for? What awaits us? While often dismissed as a period of wastefulness or lost time, waiting may also intensify experience and become a condition in which to consider questions of modernity, aesthetic process, politics, erotics and the tempos of everyday life.

Amid other theorizations of time, history and eventfulness, waiting offers a thematic axis around which conversation among scholars from a wide range of disciplines and critical perspectives can emerge. How can we unsettle the received divide between waiting and action? Or given this divide, how can we re-think the relationship between the two? Beyond (in)activity, how might waiting also be conceived of as a mode of attention or practice?

Possible paper topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
-Messianism & eschatology
-Event & revolution
-Fidelity & trust
-Designing patience: waiting rooms, drawing rooms, prisons, train stations
-Style and technique: the pause (in music and beyond), rest, suspense, seriality
-Waiting Faster: technologies of convenience, speed, acceleration-Bureaucracy: legal process, immigration, the post, (un)employment, drudgery
-Sickness & convalescence
-Ennui, anxiety, boredom, killing time
-Erotics of waiting: desire and deferral, chastity, courtly love, chivalric romance, sexual suspense
-Gestation, inspiration, latency
-Hope, fate, & inevitability
-Progress, process, & telos
-Revenge & ressentiment
-Waiting nations: birth, belatedness, & modernization
-Military strategy: ambush attack
-Immigration & exile

Send abstracts (no more than 300 words) by January 20 to
waitingtime.spring2009@gmail.com

Keynote speaker Marshall Berman

Marshall Berman, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center, will be the keynote speaker. Berman is the author of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, The Politics of Authenticity, Adventures in Marxism and other titles.