About Us
About EGSA:
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Georgetown’s English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) counts all enrolled English MA students as its members. EGSA’s elected board represents the interests of graduate students by serving as liaisons to the faculty, administration, and the student body at large. Perhaps most importantly, the board takes responsibility for providing opportunities for our students to develop and share their work as scholars. As part of this work, EGSA organizes and hosts an annual graduate student conference modeled on professional academic conferences. The day-long event features presentations by graduate students from schools nationwide, in addition to a plenary panel made up of local faculty members and a keynote address given by a well-known scholar in the field. Attendees include Georgetown students and faculty members, as well as students and faculty from nearby universities.
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About the 2016-2018 Mellon Sawyer Seminar:
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This year the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change," generously offered to partner with EGSA and sponsor the faculty plenary panel. The seminar is run by Dr. Dana Luciano, Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University; Dr. Nathan Hensley, Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University; and Dr. John McNeill, University Professor in Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. The group brings together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences, the sciences, law, and medicine in order to assess the role of humanistically-oriented interdisciplinary thought in confronting the challenges posed by the “Anthropocene,” a term designating a new epoch in planetary history intended to recognize that human activity has left a permanent record in the strata of the earth and altered the course of biotic evolution. Since the term first appeared in print in 2000, and especially since 2008, when the International Commission on Stratigraphy approved a Working Group to explore the possibility of adopting formally this designation, the Anthropocene concept has gained traction both within and beyond the academy. It places our understanding of the contemporary environmental crisis on a geological scale, directing us to a vastly extended past no less than to a deep future. In so doing, the Anthropocene demands that we comprehend anew the complex interrelations between our own time and others, local contexts and planetary scale. The Sawyer Seminar seeks both to demonstrate the necessity of humanistic inquiry in the present era of environmental change, and to explore how humanities scholars (both within and beyond the environmental humanities) can better prepare for what lies ahead.