Graduate English Organization Conference 2025: 

Forward Moving/Moving Forward 

The University of Maryland’s Graduate English Organization is thrilled to announce our 18th annual conference "Forward Moving/Moving Forward" will take place on March 7, 2025, at Tawes Hall on the University of Maryland campus. We look forward to convening scholars, artists, and visionary thinkers, some from our very own department and others from across the country and the globe, for a day of dynamic idea-sharing and community. 

Our Theme 

“It is a strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. ... We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.”

— Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Forward Moving/Moving Forward is concerned with critical interrogations of progress. Traditional, linear narratives of history posit a teleological movement toward enlightenment and improvement, with things inevitably getting better over time. However, is this always true? Under what circumstances is action or intervention necessary? Does forward movement always entail moving forward?

We approach our topic broadly, with “Forward Moving” addressing the physical movement of bodies through space, and “Moving Forward” evoking the evolution of ideas and ideologies. The confluence of these two ideas questions the relationship between the motions of bodies and that of ideas. When do they connect? Why do they diverge? What might these movements reveal to us in the present moment of plural crises?