Where: Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
When: August 2-5, 2017
Deadline for Abstracts: January 10, 2017
Acceptances by February 15, 2017
Plenary Speakers and Workshop Leaders: Pauline Greenhill, Dan Taulapapa McMullin,
Veronica Schanoes, Kay Turner, Jack Zipes, and more to be confirmed.
Conflict can give rise to violence but also to creativity. In the 1690s, French fairy-tale writers
imagined through their fairy tales ideal resolutions to political conflict (Louis XIV’s absolutism),
as well as conflict in conceptions of gender and marriage practices. The German tale tradition
was transformed by the migration of French Huguenots to Germanic territories after the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which prohibited the practice of Protestantism in
France. The German Grimm Brothers drew from the tale tradition to create a cohesive notion of
Germanic traditions and to contest French domination in the nineteenth century. Postcolonial
writers such as Salman Rushdie, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nalo Hopkinson, and Sofia Samatar draw
from wonder tale traditions in ways that disrupt Western narrative traditions. And multimedia
storytelling that dips both into history and the fantastic has advanced decolonial and social
justice projects. These are only a few examples of the ways in which authors think with stories in
times of conflict.
With this conference we hope to bring fairy-tale scholars together to reflect upon the genre in
relation to questions that include but are not limited to: migrants and migration in different
geographical locations and historical periods; political and social upheaval; and transformations
with an eye to alternative futures. One of our goals is to encourage a dialogue between creative
and scholarly thinking with wonder tales in times of conflict.
The conference will consist of plenary talks, workshops, panels with papers, and roundtables.
Papers for panels: Please send us a 300-word abstract along with your institutional affiliation for
papers of no more than 20 minutes.
Roundtables: If you would like to propose a roundtable, please include a 150-word abstract of
the topic and a list of participants with their institutional affiliations; each presentation by
roundtable participants should be no more than 10 minutes.
Cristina Bacchilega (cbacchi@hawaii.edu) and Anne Duggan (a.duggan@wayne.edu)