Graduate Student Conference

2026 Conference Announcement

The German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch (GNSD) graduate conference committee invites you to our graduate student conference entitled "In-Between Wor(l)ds: Liminality, Poetry and Performance". We are excited to receive the author, poet, performer, cultural theorist, and media artist, Adeena Karasick (Pratt Institute, Humanities and Media Studies Department), as our keynote speaker for this event. The conference will feature academic and artistic work exploring the liminal from a broad range of perspectives and disciplines.

The conference will be held in person at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, on Friday, November 6, and Saturday, November 7, 2026.

Adeena Karasick's Sonic Warfare

Through a language mired in interlingual insurrection, Sonic Warfare negotiates the fraught reality of generative artificial intelligence, large language models and their impact on contemporary socio-philosophical, linguistic and political ethos. Highlighting how when presence is relational and there is no fixed, locatable Truth, when everything is haunted by repetition, substitutions, veiled surveillance, within a scrolling corollary of coded communication, it wryly examines the public conversation on one of the most important global challenges facing the world today. 

Also referred to as acoustic weaponry, “Sonic warfare,” is the use of intense, directed sound waves causing vertigo, nausea and disorientation. In the way Nan Goldin draws on the metaphor of the Stendhal Syndrome, a psychosomatic condition of dizziness, confusion or even hallucinations triggered by exposure to intense beauty, Sonic Warfare emits ultra-high frequency blasts of vibratory infrasonic psychological “warfare” vertiginously reorienting us towards new socio-semantic- perceptions of meaning and being.

Johanna Drucker praises Karasick's new work: "Sonic Warfare reads like the explosive scrying of a digital Delphic oracle spoken by a Cassandra decoder operating with the protocols of a stuttering LLM going into spastic analytics in an excess of insight affordances. For extras, throw in the pop-Golem conjured through Kabbalistic combinatorics and watch the protocols unravel. Or, we could just say this is as of-themoment hyper-poetics as any being composed today. Kind of dazzling’ hot blasted as flesh circuitry spinning out obsessively."

Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a NY based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 18 books of award-winning poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein), “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work” (Mark Scroggins), “informed by a ferocious and acute rigor.” (Barrett Watten). Honors include: 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form (MEA), Outstanding Book of the Year Award (ICA); 2023 Inaugural League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Award; Canada Council for the Arts Creation Award (2025) for Star/Crossed: The Judia of Toledo and the King of Castille); 3-time recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award and the Voce Donna Italia Award for contributions to feminist thinking. Dr. Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor of Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, and Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

2026 Conference Schedule

All presentations (including Zoom sessions) will take place in Pillsbury Hall, room 412.

Proposal Submission

Proposal submissions for the 2026 conference are now closed. Should you have any questions, please contact the conference committee at [email protected].