REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!!

 

 REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!

 

Howdy one and all! REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN FOR OUR TWO-DAY, TWO_STREAM SYMPOSIUM! Thanks to Tim Atkins for the poster design!

You can register by making a payment of £50.30 here: https://paypal.me/timememorywest

The symposium will take place at the University of Essex, in Colchester, UK, on 10 and 11 September 2026.

Registration costs £50.30GBP, and includes lunch and refreshments on both days. We’ve kept the fees as low as possible; we know what the funding landscape is like at the moment. If it’s really not accessible to you, please do get in touch, and we’ll find a solution.

Please make sure you enter your name clearly, and we will write to you to confirm receipt!

The symposium includes key-note addresses from Neil Campbell, Erin Murrah-Mandril and Jonathan Skinner. The two-day event culminates with a poetry reading, featuring Tim Atkins, Montenegro Fisher and many more!

We will have a book table: please do bring books to sell!

For further information please contact Jordan Savage – jksava@essex.ac.uk – or Richard Parker – richard.parker@uc.cl

STREAM 1: TIME, MEMORY AND FORGETTING IN THE WESTERN

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”— Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain.

The Western functions under great temporal pressure: it is a historical genre untethered from history; a compendium of stories of personal struggle that insists on the mythological interchangeability of their characters; a mythological cycle that purports to stand for the legal basis of a nation. The Western’s myths take place at the end of time, at the start of time, upon a timeless and momentary temporal plane. How can we catalogue the types of time in the Western?  How can we theorise their interrelation? What durational spaces do other voices open up in the monolithic clock-time of the official Western? What time is High Noon?

This two-day symposium aims to bring together scholars working across literature, film and media studies, history, Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies and the environmental humanities to explore how time and memory structure the Western as a genre and cultural formation. We are especially interested in work that approaches the Western as a mutable form, continually revising its own histories through formal experimentation and political critique.

Our Stream 1 Keynotes are Professor Neil Campbell and Dr Erin Murrah-Mandril.

 

 Neil Campbell is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby, U.K.  He published an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the post-war American West: The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), The Rhizomatic West (2008) and Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West (both University of Nebraska Press2013). He co-edited the book series Place, Memory, Affect with Rowman Littlefield International, and has a volume within it, Affective Critical Regionality (2016). He edited Under the Western Sky (University of Nevada Press, 2018), a collection of essays on the fiction and music of Willy Vlautin and published Worlding the West (2022, University of Nevada Press). He is currently working on a new book, Errant Wests.

Erin Murrah-Mandril an Associate Professor of English and a core faculty member of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, Arlington. Her research focuses on Mexican American literary recovery and literary history, and she teaches American literature and Mexican American Studies courses. Her book In the Mean Time: The Temporal Colonization of Mexican America, (University of Nebraska Press 2020) examines Mexican American authors’ use of literary time to navigate U.S. colonization after the U.S. Mexico War. Her articles have appeared in Western American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.

Stream 2: Ed Dorn in Essex

Ed Dorn arrived at the University of Essex in 1965, at the invitation of Donald Davie, immediately after spending the summer on the Reservation in preparation for The Shoshoneans. The sudden move east and the connections it brought with the ferment of experimental poetics in the UK at the time would lay the foundations for Dorn’s great work of western achronology Gunslinger (1968-75). This symposium explores the work of Edward Dorn, with particular attention to his time at the University of Essex and its broader intellectual, cultural and political contexts, as well as thought on Dorn’s American West and his temporalities.

Gunslinger is as temporally slippery as any western ever made and its germination in Essex and its calcifying look westward from the misty estuarine marshes of Wivenhoe makes “Dorn in Essex” the perfect partner to the Time, Memory, and the Western in which this Dorn event will unfold.

This stream culminates with a poetry reading and a visit to the University of Essex Special Collections, where some early Dorn pamphlets in our holdings will be on display.

Our Stream 2 Keynote is Jonathan Skinner, of the University of Warwick.

Dr Jonathan Skinner is Reader in English and Comparative Literary Studies and teaches Ecocriticism and Creative Writing. His interests include Contemporary Poetry and Poetics; Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies; Small Press Culture; Sound Studies; Critical Theory; and Translation. He is founder and editor of ecopoetics, a journal which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology.