March 20-2026 GSEC Conference
5 March 2026
Join us on Friday, March 20 for GSEC's 2026 conference, Shorelines, which celebrates graduate student research on the shorelines of discipline, method, and genre.
Conversations, Transitions, and Crossings in Literary Studies
Education South 3-03 & 3-15 | 8:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
A gathering that celebrates graduate student research on the shorelines of discipline, method, and genre. Taking inspiration from Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, this day of conversation will be a “[site] of dense relationality, renewing relationships, reaffirming connections and generating ecosystems” (79) that culminates in a keynote address by Dr. Patrick Nickleson titled “On Shorelines and Songs.”
Keynote: On Shorelines & Songs
Dr. Patrick Nickleson
Humanities Centre 3-95 | 3:30 p.m.
Shorelines draw out the overlooked heterogeneity of property forms. Between the publicly owned water and the private property of a beachfront mansion, the “wet sand rule” endures, marking a fluctuating share of common ground meant to guarantee the human right of access to water. My work has focused for years on the relationship between musical and landed property through questions of ownership and access, sampling and theft, song incarceration and rematriation. This keynote offers the chance to think back on my own memories of songs sung to or in relation with waterways in four cities I have lived in. Calling upon sound art installations, commercial pop and folk songs, and collaborative research experiments, I practice the methodological work of staging these relationships in response to an unexpected invitation which renders ongoing work in an entirely new perspective.
Program
8:30 a.m.
Education South 3-03
Opening Remarks
9:00 a.m.
Education South 3-03
Toads, Bats, and Deer
Tess Casher, “The Sound of the Wind”
Navreet Gill, “Following the Bat: Translated Into Different Ecologies”
Nitasha Baig, “Deer, Women, and (Non)Consensual Consumption”
Education South 3-15
Ways of Seeing
Teddy Jessop, “Art against Vanishing Acts: Artistic Expression in Guantanamo”
Rachel Burlock, “‘A sort of sinking feeling’: Fanciful and Unsettling Marshlands of Lake Manitoba”
Emily Vilcsak, “Beyond the Binary and Barriers: A Critical Narrative Inquiry of Hidden Disability Identity on
Instagram”
10:00 a.m.
Education South 3-03
Joy, Hybridity, Diaspora
Aon Ul Abideen, “Black Aliveness in David Chariandy’s Brother: On Re-Membering Black Community through Joy”
Zhishang Wang, “History and Hybridity in Contemporary Asian American Queer Women’s Poetic Writing”
Francina Cousins, “‘This Place is Nowhere’: Queer Diasporic Unbelonging in Dionne Brand’s In Another
Place, Not Here”
Education South 3-15
Merganser, Snowberry, and Aspen: Relationality Amongst Prairie Species
Meaghan Sych
Reece Gritzmacher
Chelsea Novak
11:00 a.m.
Education South 3-15
Professor Nina Sun Eidsheim
2026 Distinguished Visiting Speaker “Writing (Music) Theory”
12:00 p.m.
Education South 3-03
Lunch
1:00 pm
Education South 3-03
Decoloniality, Feminisms, Messiness
Julianna Wagar, “‘I couldn’t help but wonder,’ will I ever find love?: Autofiction, Romance Creation, and Here’s My Card”
Marissa Stelmack, “‘I gave my uummati to the nuna’ [I gave my heart to the land]: Identity, Intimacy, and Resilience in Where the Sea Kuniks the Land”
Karen McFadyen, “Smear Campaign: Revolting Ambivalence in Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands”
Education South 3-15
Coasts and Curses
Richard Costa, “Submergent Coastlines, Drowned Worlds, and the Coastline Paradox”
Sosthenes Ekeh, “Resource Curse: The Logic of Excess and Lack in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water”
Sam Buryn, “‘Transitive Transience’: Examining the Narrative Grammar of the Offshore Rig”
2:00 p.m.
Education South 3-03
Speculating Future/Time
Hanako Teranishi, “Waking Up and Dying on Shore: Exploring the Tension between Ecological Devastation and Futurity through Satellite Imaging and Bi Gan’s Resurrection (2025)”
Theo Gray, “Migration and the Distortion of Time in Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records”
Tianne Jensen-DesJardins, “‘You have a— relationship with the land’: Porous Time and Entangled Intimacy in Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation
Education South 3-15
Ways of Making
Amy Weber, “Shorelines in the Work of Bang Hai Ja”
Adhora Ahmed, “Living and Moving with Ice”
E’lyna Do, “The Transnational Influence of Komako Sunada: Performing American and Japanese Identities”