The UC Davis English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) is hosting its fourth annual student-led Connections Conference under the wide-ranging theme of “Time.” This year’s conference considers “Time” in its broadest sense. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “time” is defined as “A finite extent or stretch of continued existence.” Time has also been conceptualized in other terms. Anna Kornbluh describes the compressed homogeneity of how we experience time within the paradigm of “too late capitalism” as “the sleepless Groundhog Day in which we socialize all the time, work all the time, consume all the time, answer all the time.” (2023, 36) Leanne Betasomasake Simpson invokes a Nishnaabeg understanding of time, in which “[t]he future is here in the form of the practices of the present, in which the past is also here influencing” (2017, 213). Time also unfolds on scales beyond human comprehension, as Eva Horn suggests that in “the Anthropocene, both the past and the future unfurl into a deep time which can no longer be comprehended in terms of individual or collective experience” (2020, 158).

Following these diverse approaches to time, the Connections 2026 conference invites scholars of all experience levels (undergraduate, graduate, and independent scholars) to submit proposals for both critical and creative multi-media projects. We welcome works from literary studies, cultural studies, creative writing, history, rhetoric and composition studies, education, and other adjacent disciplines. Potential papers and projects may engage with fields and topics including, but not limited to the following:

• Migration, immigration, and temporal displacement

• Indigenous studies and indigenous temporalities

• Speculative fiction and imagined futures

• Folklore, cultural memory, and repertoire

• Narratives of progress and development through time

• Historiography, chronopolitics, power and temporal order

• Time as labor, resource, or commodity

• The archive, memory, conservation, and commemoration

• Ephemerality, performance, and disappearance

• Time and embodiment, time as affect

• Queer temporality or non-normative temporalities

• Futurity, nostalgia, and hauntology

• The temporality of environmental/social justice

• Geological time

• Afterlives of digital media and materiality

• Political cycles and news cycles

• Temporality in film, media, and gaming

• The temporalities of learning and pedagogy, pedagogical shifts through time 

• Theology and time

Please submit proposals of 250 words or fewer by the extended deadline March 13th, 2026 through our Proposal Submission Form. 

Critical scholarly papers will be presented in panels with 15 minutes allotted to each paper. Creative submissions (poetry/fiction, artwork, digital media, etc.) can be presented as part of a panel or in an exhibit format. Please see our proposal form for further information on submission criteria.

Any questions can be directed to 2026 conference co-directors, Alison Oses (aloses@ucdavis.edu) and TJ Advincula-De Los Angeles (tadelosangeles@ucdavis.edu).