The 37th Congress of AULLA: ‘Worldmaking’ (UQ)
$800 Essay Prize for Postgraduate Research Students
AULLA invites submission of essays for The Sussex-Samuel Prize for Postgraduate Students.
The Sussex-Samuel Prize for Postgraduate Students is offered by the Australasian
Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA) to encourage postgraduate
student participation in the broader scholarly community. The prize is awarded every two
years for a paper presented at the AULLA Congress by a postgraduate student and judged by
a panel within the Executive to be significant, innovative and accomplished. The applicant
must be a currently enrolled postgraduate research student. The author of the winning
paper will receive a prize of AUS $800, and the paper will be developed for publication in the
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (JLLC, formally AUMLA). To be considered for the
prize, the paper must be submitted as a 5000-7000 word essay on the Congress theme
before 30 April 2013 (email to: jan.shaw@sydney.edu.au) and the applicant must deliver a
version of the paper at the Congress. If in the opinion of the selection committee no suitable
essay has been submitted, the prize may not be awarded in that year.
The 37th Congress of AULLA will be a wide-ranging exploration of ‘Worldmaking.’
In 1978 Nelson Goodman explored the relation of ‘worlds’ to language and literature. He
asked how a world is made, what it might be made of, and how the process of making a
world relates to understanding it. Ways of Worldmaking showed that there was no one
language to express and understand the world, but many languages, many ways in which
‘universes of worlds as well as worlds themselves may be built’. Goodman’s pluralistic vision
has been taken up in a range of disciplines concerned with issues of globalisation from
Gayatri Spivak’s work on the subaltern and the process of ‘worlding’ to Pheng Cheah’s
exploration of the value and limits of ‘world literature’.
This Congress will explore how worlds and worldmaking feature in language and literature
and in humanities scholarship. It asks what our various disciplines identify as the worlds we
make in connection to ‘the world’ at large. How is worldmaking defined and articulated?
What is at stake in the process? What does it mean to make, unmake, or remake a world, to
experience, feel, or belong to a world? How might we understand – or make bridges
between – natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic and virtual worlds?
For full conference details including registration and submission of abstracts see the AULLA
2013 Congress website: http://conference2013.aulla.com.au/
Congress enquiries to Liam.Semler@sydney.edu.au
Sussex-Samuel Prize enquiries to Jan.Shaw@sydney.edu.au