Call for Papers 2026
A Graduate Student Symposium presented by the Graduate Group in Classics, Archaeology, and History of Art (GGACHA) at Bryn Mawr College to take place in person Friday–Saturday, March 27–28, 2026 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, with possible consideration for Zoom participation TBD. The keynote speaker will be Egbert J. Bakker, Alvan Talcott Professor of Classics at Yale University.
Consumption—whether biological, ecological, or socioeconomical—is a practice in which individuals and groups have participated, from the earliest hunter-gatherers to multi-media consumption today. Ideas of consumption can vary from the physical act of eating, colonialism and the expansion of power, consumerism and influencer culture to the rejection of consumption by means of moderation, anti-consumerism, and #de-influencing social media trends.
The Bryn Mawr College Graduate Group invites submissions to an interdisciplinary graduate student symposium. We seek graduate students, artists, writers, musicians, performers, and humanists of all kinds to share their knowledge, research, work, and experiences in an interdisciplinary and engaging intellectual space that tests the boundaries of research on, and interpretation of, consumption, from the ancient to the modern in the humanities, humanistic social sciences, and the arts.
Potential Topics might include:
· Consumption across the philosophical tradition
· Methods of eating, from gluttony to starvation
· Visual representations of consumption
· Conquest and colonialism
· Disease or bodily atrophy
· Sites and material culture of consumption
· Capitalism and insatiability
· Psychologies of over- and under-consumption
· Any other topic that relates to consumption more broadly