Announcing the Conference Theme

The conference theme for NAVSA 2024 is “event,” interpreted broadly: the event that is NAVSA, BAVS, AVSA; catastrophic events (like climate change); history and temporality; chronologies and periodization; narrative; theater and spectacle; performativity and identity; personal events (marriage, birth, death); autobiography and biography; unnaratable events (the sublime, the visionary, the transcendent); the bildungsroman; the relationship of form to change; historical poetics and strategic formalism; longue durée; jetztzeit; Foucauldian archaeologies; alternative events (the optative, historiographic metafiction, steampunk); notions of singularity (systems theory, AI, climate), the eventuality of the digital; Event and revolution (Badiou, Dupuy, Žižek); and so on.