Schedule At-A-Glance:

Main events will take place at the OSU Wes Watkins Center (see map)

Note: The Remember the 10 Race will be taking place Saturday morning. Please enter Wes Watkins from the North side of the building.

This Year’s Theme: Sense and Sensation

Sense, we know the five, is the first means of grasping the world. Without it, what would be left of us? We who make the arts, humanities, and languages our haven cannot but owe our efforts to sense, an overlooked simplicity remembered upon, say, a rose thorning a fingertip. Touch, while modest and minor, is nothing to scoff at. Haven’t we all at one time felt our shared texture with the bigger pictures: a clarity that others live lives as complex as ours, a solidarity that the written word sparks the locomotion of history, and a pang that some violence is as invisible as the air we breathe yet right before our eyes? Reach out your hands; can you feel it too?

“Sense & Sensation” paints a mosaic of questions. How has sense complemented or disputed other kinds of knowledge—rational, emotional, or speculative? Is it pure aesthetic, or can sensation put us in contact with others, including outsiders or nonhumans? Is human sense uniform, or does it evolve over the fraught centuries? A good book conjures sense, and utterance is a bloc of sensations. In a moment when the humanities are squeezed to justify their worth to a culture smitten with its economy, it is fitting to return to a basic question: just what is sensible?

The Southern Plains Conference invites presentations from scholars, students, artists, critics, linguists, storytellers, theorists, and hopefuls. Look to our differences and commonality. Does common sense establish harmony or spiral into the vilest of consensus? To what extent do judgment and tradition oppose sense to nonsense? Might nonsense flourish into a sense-to-come, at which point, how can it arise from our interdisciplinary work that refuses “sensible” labels? Might findings in the sciences inspire thinking about consciousness and sensation anew? In all these lines of inquiry, expanding our powers of sensation means to humble ourselves to, and channel our research toward, a fundamental level of experience.

Plenary

Jesse Ball

Evening of

Friday, April 19

Refreshments start at 5:30PM

Opening remarks start at 6:00PM

Visiting writer Profile:

jesseball.com*

*not viewable through Chrome

Sponsored by the FAE rawdon norris Endowment and the OSU English Department

Tiegan Willoughby

Financial Affairs Co-coordinator

MA - Linguistics

Steph Link

Faculty Advisor

Director of Graduate Studies

English Department

Mary Lou Sare

SA

RE

OSU Alumna

Looking forward to seeing you at the conference!

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