The Sussex-Samuel Prize for Postgraduate Students is offered by the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA) to encourage postgraduate student participation in the broader scholarly community. The prize is awarded every two years for a paper presented at the AULLA Congress by a postgraduate student and judged by a panel within the Executive to be significant, innovative and accomplished. The applicant must be a currently enrolled postgraduate research student. The author of the winning paper will receive a prize of AUS$800, and the paper will be developed for publication in The Journal of Literature, Language and Culture. To be considered for the prize, the paper must be submitted as a 5000-7000 word essay on the Congress theme by midnight on 30 April 2015. If in the opinion of the selection committee no suitable essay has been submitted, the prize may not be awarded in that year.

In 2015 AULLA Congress is part of the inaugural Australian Literary Studies Convention to be held at the University of Wollongong in July. This is a landmark literary studies event that is being organised under the auspices of the Australasian Association for Literature, Association for the Study of Australian Literature and AULLA. The convention will bring together members of all the major Australian literary studies organisations to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of literary studies in this country. The convention will serve as the 2015 Congress of AULLA and the theme is Literary Networks.

Literature is a meeting point for intersecting lines of thought and feeling about the world. As the German critic Theodore Adorno observes in his Aesthetic Theory: “Art is autonomous and it is not…. The great epics, which have survived even their own oblivion, were in their age intermingled with historical and geographical reportage.” Like its object of study, the discipline of literary criticism survives by making connections to other disciplines and to other ways of thinking and feeling about the world. Literary thinking, in this sense, is networked thinking. It is intermingled with other modes of discourse such as the philosophical, the linguistic, the political, the social, the geographical, the theological and the sexual.

We invite papers that engage with literature and literary criticism as a network where a network is understood very broadly as a group or system of interconnected people or things. Given that this conference seeks to bring together scholars who work in and between a variety of national literatures, literary, media and cultural histories, we encourage submissions that engage with and exemplify the rich variety of critical and creative practices currently being undertaken under the aegis of ‘literary studies’ in a contemporary Australian context.

For enquiries about or entries to The Sussex-Samuel Prize for Postgraduate Students contact jan.shaw@sydney.edu.au.

For full conference details including registration and submission of abstracts see the Literary Studies Convention website.