Click here for the current Program (updated 07 November)

Plenary Speaker: Gerald Edelman, MD, PhD, winner of the Nobel Prize.

Dr. Edelman is a neuroscientist whose books include Neural Darwinism,  Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, and, most recently, Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. He is  professor and chair of the department of Neurobiology at the Scripps Research Institute, director of the Neurosciences Institute, and acts as president of the Neurosciences Research Foundation. 

Invited Artists: Eduardo Kac, Warren Neidich, Allison Hunter, Eve Andree Laramee, Daniel Wenk, Zane Berzina, James Tenney and Alison Knowles.

Keynote Panels:  This year, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, will feature a series of keynote panels matching invited artists and prominent critics, among them Cary Wolfe, Barbara Marie Stafford, and N. Katherine Hayles

The conference program is organized around a set of parallel streams: a BLUE stream for work in electronic literature; a GREEN stream for ecocriticism; a GREY stream for the conference theme of cognitive science and emergence; and a RED stream for work in the visual arts.

We will launch each stream with a prominent panel at the opening of the conference on the afternoon of Thursday, November 10. Thus, we urge all attendees to arrive on Thursday in time for the opening of the conference with the first cluster of panels in the blue, green, grey, and red streams at 4:00 p.m. A second cluster of panels will start at 6:00 p.m., followed by the general reception at 8:00.

These streams will continue throughout the conference, joined by others formed around themes of literature, theory, media and other arts, and technology. We have reserved late-afternoon sessions on Friday and Saturday for a plenary panel and a roundtable forum devoted to the conference theme of cognition/emergence and the arts..

The conference will be held at the historic tower of the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, in view of the Wrigley Building and the Chicago River. A reception will be held nearby at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a venue overlooking a new landscape installation by Vito Acconci.

Participants can book rooms at the Intercontinental at a special conference rate of $159.00 for single or double rooms in the main building or $189.00 for single or double rooms in the historic tower. The phone number for reservations is (312) 944–4100; the hotel web site is www.chicago.intercontinental.com.When booking a room, you should mention the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. Please note, rooms must be booked by October 18, 2005 to receive discounted rates.  

Speakers must be 2005 members of SLSA. To join or to renew membership, please go to http://www.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/associations/sls_membership.cgi, or call Johns Hopkins University Press Journals at 800 548 1784 (US & Canada only, all others call 410 516 6987). Mon-Fri 8-am-5pm FAX 410 516 6968. Email: jlorder@jhupress.jhu.edu.

The conference fee of US$120 may be sent, c/o Joseph Tabbi, to the Department of English, University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607. Tel 312 413 2200. Checks should be made out to 2005 SLSA.  For late registration (received after October 18, 2005), the fee increases to $140. Unfortunately SLSA cannot accept Credit Card payments for conference registration. However, participants from outside the U.S. may pay by cash (at the usual rate of $120) at the conference registration desk. Conference Registration for graduate students is $80. 

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The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts fosters the multi-disciplinary study of the relations among literature and language, the arts, science, medicine, and technology.