Lilith Acadia

A Private Universal: the Contradiction of Enlightenment Religion Reflected in Contemporary Science Fiction

The Enlightenment concept of ‘Religion’ we take for granted emerged with a contradiction. ‘Religion’ as private belief overtook religion as a public source of power. Imperialists justified their exploits by claiming religion is an inherent universal, which remains a pretext for civilizing missions, interpreting non-European institutions as ‘religions’ on a Christian prototype, and positing religion as an academic object. Following Carl Freedman that science fiction holds unique analytical potential, I analyze science fiction illustrations of discursively and contradictorily constructed religion. Layering fictional and historical ‘Religion,’ this paper critiques contemporary understandings as at once private and universal, personal and common.

Lilith Acadia is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, studying discourses of religion, religion in science fiction, and feminist epistemology. Acadia’s dissertation reinterprets the terms ‘religion’ and ‘pretext,’ then reads those conceptions through 20th Century North American science fiction to reveal and contest how theological and ethical discourses utilize the modern construction of ‘religion’ as a pretext for violence. After graduating from Smith College, Acadia held a Research Fulbright in Germany and earned an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford.

Rana Baker

(Media) Technology Constructs Common Sense: Science as Progress and the Printing Press in Nineteenth Century Cairo.

My paper will demonstrate how the notion of “science as progress” came to assume the status of common sense in the Egyptian every-day in late 19th century Cairo. I will do so by examining the role of the printing press in “popularising” science by making scientific treatises and journals available on a mass basis. One such journal was al-Muqtataf, first published in 1876 in Beirut and later in Cairo beginning in 1884. I will discuss how al-Muqtataf played a primary role in promoting the idea of science as a prerequisite for liberation from foreign rule, and demonstrate how print helped construct a mass community of readers who subscribed to, and debated, this idea.

Rana Baker is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. Her PhD research is focused on the history of science in nineteenth century Cairo. In particular, she is concerned with the material history of paper and the printing press, as well as their role in founding the material infrastructure of modern universities. She did her MA at SOAS, University of London.

Alexander Brock

“The Theater, the Cave, and the Garden in Illusion Comique

Pierre Corneille’s metatheatrical Comic Illusion presents both a play within a play and a play within a play within a play. The first takes place in a cave, and the second in a garden. Corneille thus links together three separate spaces: the cave, the garden, and the stage. Each of these three spaces is a zone where the opposing terms of art and nature are blurred. In each, spectators can see nature becoming artifice, or artifice becoming nature. Yet by nesting the scene of the garden within the scene of the cave on the scene of the stage, Corneille calls into question the idea that a mutability between artifice and nature can be limited to the garden or the theater.

Alexander Brock is a first-year doctoral student in comparative literature at Princeton University. Born and raised in Seattle, he holds a master’s in French literature and a diploma in literatures and languages from the École normale supérieure. He is currently interested in themes of magic, illusions, liminal spaces, and identity in 17th-century Western European literature.

Filipa Calado

“Speculating upon Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mark on the Wall'”

This talk examines how digital environments harness virtual and physical tensions of texts to reveal new readings . I apply twenty-first century paradigms of perception that explore how digital technologies simultaneously expand and marginalize our perceptive capacities toward a digital edition of Virginia Woolf’s short story, “The Mark on the Wall.” I find that this resource, which digitizes the multiple print versions of Woolf’s story over 20 years, encourages readers to reconsider the role of time across the physical and narrative levels of the text.

Filipa Calado is a PhD student in English at the Graduate Center, in the City University of New York (CUNY). She works on Transatlantic Modernism, with a focus in Digital and Visual Studies. Most recently, her interests turn toward the digital as a methodology, specifically the role of digital methods and tools in literary analysis.

Troizel Carr

unsettle me: a meditation on sex in the under/commons

this paper wishes to meditate on how we might locate sexuality in the under/commons, which I read here through the Netflix series Sense8. if we believe that the haptic has potential between the surfaces of skin, then sex is the performance of the haptic and surface aesthetics joining across a landscape of subjectivity and objectivity. what does it feel like when objects touch? this paper hopes to be an experimentation with academic form and performance as only a paper can do for itself and not for or through its reader.

Troizel is black + queer + alive and it is downright revolutionary. He exists at the interstice of academic scholarship and performative praxis, wherein which he is concerned with the textured and erotic relationship that blackness has to being. In particular, his current research interest seeks to explode the slave ship hold as an otherworldly scene of queer sensualities.

Apala Das

Heorot and the Aesthetics of Translation in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf

This paper explores the implications of Seamus Heaney’s notable emphasis on the word “hall” in his translation of Beowulf. Heaney seems to be keenly aware of the centrality of the “mead-hall” in Anglo-Saxon culture not only as something that served as a drinking-hall but also as a space for the distribution of wealth (exploits of battle) and for gift-giving among the commons. The qualities of orality and commonality that mark Heaney’s translation work towards tracing the legacy of an undifferentiated historical continuity between Heaney’s own Hibernian tradition and that of English. However, these qualities also contribute in consciously sealing off the poem in an ahistorical – yet contemporary – realm of poetic order. This paper argues that the “hall” in Beowulf, an icon of the Anglo-Saxon poetic principle of apposition, figures as Heaney’s search for home, in history and poetry.

Apala Das is a first-year PhD student at the Department of English, University of Toronto. Born and raised in India, she received her undergraduate and master’s degrees in English Literature from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. Her primary area of research interest is Transatlantic Modernist Literature. She is also interested in Global Modernisms, Comparative Medievalisms, Aesthetics and Poetics, and South Asian Studies. 

Chloe Estep

Manuscript modernity: the ballpoint pen in Maoist China

The 1958 pseudo-documentary Hero Catches up to Parker chronicles Hero, a Shanghainese pen manufacturer, and its mad dash to “catch up” to American Parker Pens in a mere 25 days. This paper argues that the film places the question of how to write at the symbolic center of China’s economic and social transformation by introducing the ballpoint pen—an industrialized, foreign implement of manuscript writing—as a replacement for the calligraphy brush—a symbol of China’s literati past. In positioning the pen as an icon of cultural superiority and technological advancement, the film requires us to reconsider the role of manu-script in the history of writing in the twentieth century.

Chloe Estep is a doctoral candidate in modern Chinese literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation addresses the relationship between poetic language and writing technologies in the twentieth century. She is interested in print and manuscript culture, poetics, and translation studies. She received a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She spent 2016-2017 conducting dissertation research in China funded by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship.

Emma Ianni 

Constructing Outsiders: A Comparative Study of Ritualized Insults

In this paper, I argue that commonplace beliefs about women’s inability to restrain themselves and to adhere to the community’s set of moral values make them the non-citizens par excellence; in popular festivities, insulting the authorities by attributing female traits and attitudes to them enables the lower classes to cast them outside of the social group as non-citizens, thus reclaiming the political and symbolic power that they do not possess otherwise. Insults characterize those civic moments celebrating the common and the vernacular, embodying the reversal of power dynamics. If hierarchies are subverted, shouldn’t they provide a chance for women to take a more visible role in society? To examine this paradox, I carry out a cross-cultural comparison of sexualized insults in popular rituals – the Eleusinian mysteries, the Roman triumph and contemporary processions in Italy. Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and their work on liminality and intersectionality of body and speech provide the theoretical framework of my project.

Emma Ianni is a first year PhD candidate in Classics at Columbia University. Emma is mostly interested in the interplay and dialogue between ancient and modern texts, in a way that goes beyond reception and aims at showing how later text can illuminate the Classics. Moreover, in her research, she plans on focusing on the reading of ancient text alongside feminist criticism, with special interest to Greek drama. She is also fascinated by literary theory, ancient social history of popular festivals and rituals, representations of “anomalous women” throughout literatures and the idea of fragments. She received her B.A. in Classics and Comparative Literature from Cornell University (2017), where she graduated with a thesis on comparative perspectives on gendered insults both in ancient festivals and in contemporary ones.

Ariel Leutheusser

Silent Dailiness – Monumentalizing the Unwritten Quotidian

Roland Barthes’ Journal de deuil and La chamber clare, alongside his lecture course given from January to May 1977, “Comment vivre ensemble,” are placed into conversation in this paper, with particular attention given to his object of examination in his lecture course: idiorrhythmy – the rhythms and actualities of living together. Barthes’ engagement with and depiction of his quotidian, common experiences, and the agony he experiences in recognizing their common-ness, and the everyday nature of mourning, form the textual basis for this literary analysis of the spaces of feeling we inhabit everyday, in public and private (domestic) spaces.

Ariel Leutheusser is a Ph.D. Student in Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. They completed their B.A. and M.A. at The Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Their research interests include affect theory, queer theory and Frankfurt school theory. Their research pursues the study of literary nonfiction writing and long-form journalism and the depiction of reality in writing

Alice Martin

“Utility and Amusement”: Elevating the Common to Political Purpose in Eliza Cook’s Journal

While chartist Eliza Cook’s domestic poems such as “Household Walls” and “The Streets” are often considered sentimental, I argue that such poems are just as successful at promoting her leftist agenda as her essays. Cook’s treatment of ordinary objects elevates their socio-political role, thereby also elevating the role of often-exploited people. By investigating the reception of Cook’s poetry and considering the object relationships in these poems, my paper aims to challenge our understanding of female perspectives in politics, explore how such perspectives operated in Victorian print culture, and inspect what limits common objects and alternative subjects in the political landscape.

Alice Martin is a first year Master’s candidate in the English Department at the New York University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BA in English, Communications Studies, and Creative Writing. Most recently, she worked at Writers House, LLC, a literary agency, where she served as the assistant to the CEO, editing and selecting manuscripts, negotiating publication contracts, and acting as the primary liaison between authors and publishing houses. She previously worked at other publishing institutions such as Algonquin Books and Folio Literary, as well as at Duke University, where she taught creative writing in their TIP program. She studies the intersection of print culture, material feminism, and body culture in Victorian literature. Her writing has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, and The Bookends Review, among others. She’s also a regular contributor to Shelf Awareness.

Ryan Milov-Cordoba

@realCaliph: Hārūn al-Rashīd, Revivalism, and the Arabian Nights

Since at least the 10th century, the idea of a “Caliphate” has been used to articulate, expand, and defend a distinctly Islamic polity. A closer look, however, at the dissonance in the early literature on the Caliphate (Māwardī, Juwaynī), reveals that this centerpiece of the Islamic “commons” may never have been either a truly stable or truly unified idea. In my paper, by situating a story from the Arabian Nights about Hārūn al-Rashīd in an 11th-century Revivalist milieu, I hope to suggest that, from a popular perspective, the Caliphate has always been a site of intense division, concealment, and contest.

Ryan is a 3rd-year PhD student in the Comparative Literature department at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on the evolution of the relationship between medical paradigms and literature. He is particularly interested in the following question: As the way that we think about our bodies changes, how does the way that we represent our broader lives also change?

Jess Shollenberger

Rose Rocks, or Maybe Rock Roses: Elizabeth Bishop’s Passion for Accuracy

This paper reconsiders Bishop’s much-discussed descriptive “accuracy” as a form of care: an attempt to render vague, receding, and resistant objects ethically. In the unfinished “Vague Poem,” the object of Bishop’s “passion for accuracy” is the love between two women, formless and proscribed—what she elsewhere calls the “tender passion.” Bishop places her vague love and lover in the everyday—itself resistant to description and conceptual coherency. “Vague Poem” thus enables us to think two objects often held in opposition: queer intimacy and the ordinary worlds in which it may well find its form.

Jess Shollenberger is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work combines queer studies, everyday life theory, and twentieth-century American literature. Her dissertation focuses on women’s queer imaginings of ordinary life in poetry and prose. 

Harmon Siegel

Monet and Renoir, Visions in Common

Impressionist painting depicts the world not as it is, but as it appears. That, at least, is how critics defined it when it appeared in 1874. This definition created a problem: what if that appearance is different from reality? What if different people see different things? Impressionism thus opened the Pandora’s box of skepticism. My paper asks how the impressionists responded to this problem, focusing on two paintings by Monet and Renoir, paintings that model how two people can share the common world.

Harmon Siegel studies modern art at Harvard. Besides his dissertation in progress, “Monet and Other People,” he has written on Louise Nevelson’s sculptures and William Kentridge’s films

Lyndsey Vader
Attending to the Dandelions: Theorizing The Common(s) through Performance Practice

The common(s), as an object of struggle, involves a radically open posture towards democratic, collective self-management and open access. Following Lauren Berlant (2016), this presentation considers what conceptualizations of the common(s) are necessary during transitional times. I look specifically to processes of art production as supporting infrastructures for anti-capitalist movements. In doing so, I seek to theorize the common(s), spaces of resistance, and theatrical rehearsals of radical democracy through a critical analysis of Complex Movements’ art and media-based installation project, Beware of the Dandelions (2015). I ask: How might performance open a particular type of space that encourages embodied and performative enactments of the common(s)?

Lyndsey Vader is a Ph.D. candidate in Dance Studies at The Ohio State University and holds an M.F.A in Dance from SUNY Brockport. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, Vader served as General Manager for Andrea Miller’s Gallim Dance and Program Manager for Martha Eddy at the Center for Kinesthetic Education. Vader’s research examines spaces of encounter and repertories of engagement in 21st-century experimental performance praxes in order to consider the aesthetics and politics of reconceiving audience agency and authorship in immersive environments.

Joe Zappa 

On the Politics and Semiotics of Common Aesthetic Space: Rousseau, Rancière, Derrida

My presentation makes three moves. The first is to examine an aesthetic discourse, exemplified by Rousseau and Adorno, that presents the spectator as passive and the common exposure of spectators to mass forms of culture as pernicious. The second is to explicate Rancière’s challenge to this discourse and to explain why, in Rancière’s view and my own, an optimistic aesthetics positing an active, rather than passive, spectator is essential to understanding the relations among aesthetics, politics, and space. The third is to think Rancière’s aesthetics alongside a deconstructive understanding of signification in order to shore up Rancière’s logic and illuminate a politics of aesthetics supported by Derrida’s semiotics.

Joe Zappa is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Cornell University. He is interested in affect theory, aesthetics, and their politics; French theory, particularly deconstruction; and twentieth-century literature in French and English. He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University in comparative literature and French studies.