Call for Papers - Demanding the Impossible: 3rd Utopias Conference
In December 2001 the University of Tasmania hosted a successful conference around the theme of Antipodean Utopias.
In December 2005, Monash University hosted a second conference, around the theme of Imagining the Future, to mark the long-awaited publication of Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson’s full-length monograph on utopia and science fiction. In all, there were something like 90 papers presented to this conference, including one by Jameson himself.
This third conference will return to the question of how we imagine the future and whether such imaginings remain open to the unforeseeable. Jameson famously concludes that utopia is ‘a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right’. Hopefully, the conference will play some small part in prompting similar such meditations on the impossible. Its keynote speakers will be: Terry Eagleton, whose recent publications include After Theory, Sweet Violence and Holy Terror; Tom Moylan, author of Demand the Impossible and Scraps of the Untainted Sky; Lyman Tower Sargent, founding editor of Utopian Studies and co-editor of The Utopia Reader; and Lucy Sussex, author of A Tour Guide to Utopia.
The conference invites papers from scholars, writers and others interested in utopia, dystopia and science fiction.
Conference Abstracts
Abstracts (approx. 100-150 words) should be sent by 30 September 2007 by e-mail to
or by post to:
Utopias3 Conference,
Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies,
Building 11,
Clayton campus,
Monash University,
Victoria 3800,
AUSTRALIA.
Conference Proceedings
Refereed proceedings of the conference will be published electronically in the on-line journal Colloquy.