8:00am – Registration Opens – 3rd Floor, New North Hall

 

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8:30am-9:00am – Welcome (coffee and bagels provided) – New North 311

Opening remarks provided by Dr. Ricardo L. Ortíz, Chair of the English Department, and Dr. Pamela Fox, Director of Graduate Studies

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9:00am-10:15am: Session I

Panel A: Affect/Memory - New North 408

Chair: Jacob Myers

• “Loving Digital: How Romantic is Sci-Fi in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
  Darya Levchenko, North Carolina State University
   

• “Bracketed Out by the ‘Bio’: Transgender and Disability Erasures and Counter-Memories in The Biopolitical Archive”
  Zahari Richter, George Washington University
   

• “Disconnection and Repair in Carly’s Voice: Affective Space and Relational Context”
  Kathleen Spada, University of Cincinnati

 

Panel B: Redefining Reality and Rationality - New North 204

Chair: Travis Smith

• “From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: The Ability to Work”
  Ling Liu, George Washington University
   

• “Willow Weep for Me: Agency, Individualism, and Transformative Education”
  Caroline Zuckerman, Georgetown University
   

• "Casting Class: Distributed Authorship and the Production of American Honey”
  Elizabeth Crowley Webber, Georgetown University

 

Panel C: Biopolitical Regimes, Real and Imagined - New North 311

Chair: Mary Galli

• “The Allegory of Chocolate: Politics and Representation of Torture in Contemporary Turkey”
  Lina Cakmak, American University
   

• “Hitlers and Horcruxes: Harry Potter, The Boys from Brazil, and Fascist Aspirations of Biopolitical Immortality”
  Clark Meshaw, North Carolina State University
   

• “'With Inviolable [Poli/y] Voic[ing]’: The Sexuality of the Quotations of the Rhine-daughters in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land”
  Lauren Frey, Georgetown University

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10:30am-11:45am: Session II

Panel A: Body Regulations - New North 408

Chair: Bridget Sellers

• “Nature’s Prisoners: Gender, Sex, and the Bodily Grotesque”
  Kyle Wholey, Northeastern University
   

• “Border, Text, Margin: Reading the Body in The Bluest Eye”
  Rebekah Waalkes, Tufts University
   

• “The Agency of Opioids in the Opioid Crisis”
  Rachel Graham Lussos, George Mason University

 

Panel B: (Im)material Biopower - New North 204

Chair: Daniel Breen

• “A Monument of Existence: Textual Futurity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man”
  Tess Henthorne, Georgetown University
   

• “Colonialism and the Impossible Disembodiment: Rethinking Biopolitical Motivations”
  Joshua Benson, George Washington University
   

• “Waste as Biopower Reclaimed in The Year of the Flood”
  Emma Berman, Clark University

 

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12:00pm-1:00pm: Lunch – New North 311

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1:15pm-2:30pm: Faculty Plenary Panel: “Affect, Aesthetics, Ecopolitcs” – New North 204

Sponsored by the 2016-2018 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change"

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Chair: Dana Luciano, Associate Professor of English, Georgetown University

• Elisabeth Anker, Associate Professor of American Studies & Political Science, George Washington University

• Sangeeta Ray, Professor of English, University of Maryland

• Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Associate Professor of English & Gender and Women's Studies, Pomona College
   

The faculty plenary session, "Affect, Aesthetics, Ecopolitics," considers the role of affect theory and aesthetic thought in confronting environmental crisis and imagining alternative futures. Panelists will open with brief presentations of current scholarly projects and then engage in a roundtable discussion, addressing questions posed by the session chair and the audience. 

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2:45pm-4:00pm: Session III

Panel A: Spaces, Places, and Nowheres - New North 408

Chair: Tess Henthorne

• “Black Moth, White Moth: Reading Urban Renewal’s Division of the Anthropocene”
  Annie Gala, Georgetown University
   

• “Fighting the Good Fight: Antagonism of Physical Space in The Street”
  Grace Latimore, Georgetown University
   

•  “Writing the Nationless Diaspora: Mobile Location and the Nation State in The Gunny Sack and By the Sea”

Katherine Burd, Georgetown University

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Panel B: Biopolitical Imaginings - New North 311

Chair: Alyvia Walters

• “The Convergence of High Technology and Mysticism in Contemporary American Fantasy”
  Sait Ibiši, University of Arkansas
   

• “Countervisuality within the Exception: ‘Delusional States’ and Nomos-Making in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad”
  Daniel Healy, University of Connecticut
   

•  “Wish You Were Not Here: Posthuman Narratives in Film and Television”
  Mary-Cecile Gayoso, Georgetown University
   

 

4:15pm-5:30pm: Keynote Address, "So Moved: Aesthetics, Biopolitics, Fermentation" – New North 311

• Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Associate Professor of English & Gender and Women's Studies, Pomona College