The organizers of Language in Movement conference: Pilar Chamorro and Fernando Blanco.

This coming April 27-28, the Ohio State University Symposium on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics will mark its 10th anniversary. Such milestone represents a of coming-of-age for the yearly event, but more significantly, it underscores the importance of having a well-established mechanism to bring research to life and light in a dynamic dialogue across disciplines and perspectives.

This year’s theme — Lenguas en movimiento, ciudades tránsfugas: Transformaciones del campo cultural, literario y lingüístico en el mundo luso-hispano / Línguas em movimento, cidades trânsfugas: Transformações do campo cultural, literário e lingüístico no mundo luso-hispano — reveals the symposium’s commitment to exploring the cultural and social transformations taking place in our societies in a time of fast and furious globalization and re-adjustment processes.

“It has been wonderful to see how this symposium has developed over the years, from a small, graduate-student conference into a highly regarded professional gathering featuring distinguished keynote speakers and attended by both young and well-established scholars from around the nation and several different countries,” said Fernando Unzueta, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (SPPO). “Our graduate students continue to be the symposium organizers and help us set the research agenda for the Department by providing this forum for the exchange of ideas about cutting-edge research in our fields.”

Organized by SPPO with support from the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), the 2007 symposium will have two keynote speakers: Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (literature) and Prof. Luis Ortiz López, Universidad de Puerto Rico (linguistics).

The author of literary works such as Lumpérica, Vaca sagrada and Los trabajadores de la muerte, Eltit’s novels are often populated by marginal characters and sordid landscapes in a narrative world full of ambiguous language and exaltations of the suffering female body. For his part, Ortiz has done extensive work on the influence of creole languages in the Hispanic Caribbean and is the editor of El Caribe hispánico: perspectivas lingüísticas actuales.

The 2007 event is a great opportunity for students at Ohio State and other universities to share their research interests and enrich their work, said symposium organizers Fernando Blanco (literatures and cultures) and Pilar Chamorro (linguistics), both graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

In the area of literatures and cultures, the symposium is looking at the way the re-articulation of cultural differences in light of shifting borders and the questioning of material and symbolic limits have radically altered the subject and the social bond in contemporary societies. Topics that will be explored include digital cultures, testimonial literature, film and violence against women, popular music and identity, and sexuality, gender and politics, among others.

The linguistics core of the symposium is likewise delving into the impact of recent cultural transformations, as new configurations of physical and symbolic borders are also translated into new configurations of communication systems. Topics include linguistic change and variation, the effects of contact between languages and dialects, the formation of pidgins and creoles, second-language acquisition, Spanglish, Spanish and Lusophone African varieties, and more.

“We are greatly surprised by the general reception of our symposium,” Blanco and Chamorro said. “Many people from a variety of fields and areas of study have submitted abstracts of a great academic level. We expect that our conference will be a real agora for our community.”

For more information, contact the organizers at symposium_sppo@osu.edu or log on to http://sppo.osu.edu/newsOutreach/yr2006-07/symposium/.