Thursday, February 25th
Welcome: 9:10-9:15
Plenary Address: 9:15-10:45
“Gesturing Toward the Future: Counter Casting, Gifs, and Performative Spectatorship”
Amy Cook, Stony Brook University
Chair: Jessica Hautsch, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Brian Eberle, Stony Brook University
Session 1: 11:15-12:30
Session 1a. Persistence and Perseverance: War-time, Conflict, and Collectivity
Faculty Respondent: Roger Thompson, Stony Brook University
Chair: Frank Harder, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Rachel Shomer, Stony Brook University
“‘May in time become great trees’: Wartime and Deep Time in Mary Seacole’s The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Kieran Rock, Stony Brook University.
“‘I Carry My War with Me Wherever I Go’: Modeling a Post-War Collective Identity for Lebanese Women in Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues.” Katherine Campbell, University of Virginia.
“Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018): What Gets Preserved (A Video Essay).” Lindsey Pelucacci, Stony Brook University.
Session 1b. Time, Touch, and Sound: Disturbing Phenomenological Reception
Faculty Respondent: Benedict Robinson, Stony Brook University
Chair: Jeni Friel Evans, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Brian Eberle, Stony Brook University
“Narrating ‘Off the Reel’: Mechanical Narration and Temporal Distortion in Joyce’s Ulysses.” Rachel Adibe Zein, University of Illinois at Chicago.
“Re-Embodying Disembodied Spectatorship: Rethinking Visual Art’s Prohibition on Touch Through an Interactive Theory of Reception Aesthetics.” Inbal Strauss, University of Oxford.
“Animal Specter: Acousmatic Sound in Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer Sin Cabeza (2008).” Andrea Avidad Archila, New York University.
Book Talk: 1:00-2:30 “Southeast Asian American Aesthetics and the Refugee Position.”
Timothy August, Stony Brook University
Session 2: 2:45-4:00
Session 2a. Undergraduate Honors: Celestial Mindscapes: Thought and Perspective Amidst Belief Systems and Conceptions of Mental Health
Faculty Respondent: Michael Rubenstein, Stony Brook University
Chair: Timothy Wilcox, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Jessica Hautsch, Stony Brook University
“The Portrayal of Shell Shock in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Its Role as the Initial Stage for New Logos.” Yu-Jin Chung, Stony Brook University.
“Two Astronomers Walk into a Bard – An Analysis of Shifting Cosmologies in Shakespeare’s Plays.” Scott MacKenzie, Stony Brook University.
Session 2b. Translucence and Atmospherics: Metaphysical Poetics
Faculty Respondent: Jeffrey Santa Ana, Stony Brook University
Chair: Lindsey Pelucacci, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Brian Eberle, Stony Brook University
“‘Like leaves against the sunlight’: Translucent Trans-Historicism in Derek Walcott’s The Schooner Flight.” Hannah Loeb, University of Virginia.
“Atmospheric Poetics: (Eco)Poetry in the Anthropocene.” Robert Balun, Stony Brook University.
Session 3: 4:30-5:45
Session 3a. Performing and Transforming Pop Culture
Faculty Respondent: Justin Johnston, Stony Brook University
Chair: Sara Santos, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Robert Balun, Stony Brook University
“‘There is no real me’: Meaningless Consumption and the Fragmented Neoliberal Subject in Harron’s American Psycho.” Caitlin Duffy, Stony Brook University.
“Werewolves, Bitelines, and Queer Family Making.” Jon Heggestad, Stony Brook University.
“Rolling Up Characters: Conceptual Blending Theory, Casting, and Character Construction in Dungeons and Dragons.” Jessica Hautsch, Stony Brook University.
Friday, February 26th
Session 4: 9:00-10:15
Session 4a. The Space of Nature: Narrating the Ecological
Chair: Adam Poltrack, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Kieran Rock, Stony Brook University
“Liminal Landscapes: Recuperating the Human Form and National Identity in Jean Toomer’s Cane.” Lea Borenstein, Stony Brook University.
“Promise and Precarity: Movement through Space in Upton Sinclair’s OIL!” Brian Eberle, Stony Brook University.
Session 4b. Incarceration, Coloniality, and Capture
Faculty Respondent: E.K. Tan, Stony Brook University
Chair: Anthony Gomez, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Julia Brown, Stony Brook University
“Unique incarceration events’: Margaret Atwood’s Call for Prison Reform in Hag-Seed.” Caroline Liebel, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
“The Dehumanization of Elon’s Three Little Pigs.” Cole Depuy, Binghamton University.
“Gender and [Re-]Casting in Steve McQueen’s Hunger: Selectively Culling Bobby Sands’ Writings from Prison.” Lisa LeBlond, Stony Brook University.
Session 5: 10:45-12:00
Session 5a: Undergraduate Honors: Conditions of Domination: Social Ecology and Destructive Imaginaries
Faculty Respondent: Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University
Chair: Brian Eberle, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Tayla Straub, Stony Brook University
“’Stop and Smell the Roses’ to Survive: An Analysis of Nature’s Healing Power for Women in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Gwendolyn Goodyear, Stony Brook University.
“Killing Romanticism in Madame Bovary.” Samantha Lange, Stony Brook University.
Session 5b. Recontextualizing Colonialities
Faculty Respondent: Timothy August, Stony Brook University
Chair: Caitlin Duffy, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Lea Borenstein, Stony Brook University
“Turn that Bebop Up: Singing and Swinging to the Beats and Beloved.” Richard David Bertrand, SUNY New Paltz.
“Decolonial Alterations to Christian History in William Apess’s ‘The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes.’” Jeffrey Garfield Adams, Syracuse University.
“‘I am Fighting for My Mind’: Body Horror and Colonial Critique in Doctor Who.” Julia Brown, Stony Brook University.
Session 6: 12:30-1:45
Session 6a. Collective Isolation: Psychic/Psychological Response(s) to Pandemic
Faculty Respondent: Lisa Diedrich, Stony Brook University
Chair: Jessica Hautsch, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Julia Brown, Stony Brook University
“Seeking New Horizons: Animal Crossing and Digital Community Formation in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.” April Bayer, University of South Dakota.
“Pandemic Postmemory: Trauma after Medical Disasters in Contemporary Fiction.” Shamma Alkhoori, American University of Sharjah.
“The Home: Building, Dismantling, and Rebuilding during London’s Great Plague and Fire.” Allen M Loomis, Binghamton University.
Session 6b. Becoming in the Telling: (Re)Defining Trans, Queer, and Female Spaces
Faculty Respondent: Celia Marshik, Stony Brook University
Chair: Jon Heggestad, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Kieran Rock, Stony Brook University
“Turning the Beat Around Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes.” Ashley Johnson, University of Alabama.
“Thee Process is Thee Product”: Liminality, Creativity, and the Altered State of Pandrogeny.” Andrew William Lee, Drew University.
“Gilded Cage: How the Patriarchy has Created and Condemned the Madwoman.” Megan Mau, SUNY Cortland.
Session 7: 2:15-3:30
Session 7a. Reclaiming Madness: Readings of Mental Health
Faculty Respondent: Patricia Dunn, Stony Brook University
Chair: Andrew Rimby, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Lea Borenstein, Stony Brook University
“Mental Illness as Metaphor: Madness as a Form of (Dis)Empowerment in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.” Walter Rafael Ramos Villanueva, University of Toronto.
“Cultivating and Preserving Positive Sensibility in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.” Claire B. Karnap, University of Florida.
“Delusion as Plot Twist: An Existential-Phenomenological Approach to Mad Cinema.” Ashley Barry, Stony Brook University.
Session 7b. Skeletons in the Archive: Textual Bodies
Faculty Respondent: Peter Manning, Stony Brook University
Chair: Bernard Krumm, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Tayla Straub, Stony Brook University
“The Horror of the Harvest: Denaturing the Archive in Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’” Kathryn Boyer, Pennsylvania State University.
“Embodied Archives: Trauma and Writing in Titus Andronicus.” Alice Hall, SUNY University at Buffalo.
“Transforming Garnett’s Beowulf: Re-Printing and Reproducing Old English in Late Nineteenth-Century America.” Julie Wilson, University of Virginia.
Keynote Address: 4:00-5:30
“Space Without a Map”
Rebecca Krinke, University of Minnesota
Chair: Julia Brown, Stony Brook University
Chat Moderator: Jessica Hautsch, Stony Brook University
