“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing a full man.” Francis Bacon

Faced with pressure to quantify and possibly to commodify our research and our teaching through the narrow and potentially homogenizing parameters of concepts such as ‘impact’, many researchers and teachers in English departments seem to retreat from the challenge of affirming what it is that we value in the study and teaching of English.

This one-day conference to be held at Queen Mary, University of London, aims to meet this challenge by tracing and interrogating historical and contemporary debates pertaining to English and English departments. Commencing from a suspicion of certain rhetorical commonplaces, whereby the subject is discussed as something to be ‘defended’ or ‘protected’, we hope to keep in play an openness to the future(s) of the work that we do, by considering the injunction to respond, ethically and imaginatively, to our subject-matter’s indomitable capacity to surprise and alarm.

The day is structured as a sequence of three sessions, each featuring an address from a guest speaker, followed by a panel of three shorter papers.

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