All events take place at the Whitney Humanites Center, 53 Wall Street on 12th September 2015

9:00 Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015, 120mins, DCP)

11:10 Opening Remarks

11:15 Panel: Manual Transmissions: Legacies and Consequences

Ron Gregg – Mad Max Meets Avenging Dykes on Bikes: Radical Lesbian Feminism Overruns the Post-Apocalyptic Action Blockbuster [slides]

Phoenix Alexander – Mad Max: Fury Road, ‘Feminism,’ and the Depravity of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster [slides]

Maddie Whittle – Parenthood at the End of the World: Daddy Issues, Baby Mamas, and the Post-Apocalyptic Hollywood Epic [slides]

Bilge Ebiri – “A World without Me in It”: On Self and Sacrifice in Interstellar and Mad Max: Fury Road

12:15 Lunch Break 

1:30 Panel: Liquid Spaces: Alternate Architectures and Ecologies

Cristian Oncescu –  Wasteland Baroque: Mobile Cities and Wagnerian Valkyries in Mad Max: Fury Road  [slides]

Surry Schlabs – A Phenomenology of Forgetting: On the Uses and Abuses of Architecture in Aeon Flux  [slides]

Jordan Brower – Post-Apocalyptic Solutions [slides]

J.D. Connor – Forms of Insurance: The Face, the Franchise, and the Deferred-Action Movie [slides]

2:45 Panel: Kill Switches: Programs for the Present and Future

Ila Tyagi – Cowboys and Spacemen: Post-Carbon Futures in the Mad Max Tetralogy [slides]

Andrew Vielkind – Nolan’s Technophobia: The Romanticization of Space Travel in Interstellar [slides]

Ittai Orr – Interstellar: Humanist Miracles for a Disastrous Age [slides]

Debra Fischer – Living at the Edge of a Black Hole. Alternative Worlds in Interstellar [slides]

4:00 Panel: Endtimes, Endspaces: Medium Exhaustion and Renewal

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson – Where the Sun Never Sets: Imperial Fantasy in the British Special Effects Film [slides]

Sophia Nguyen – The Gargantua of Manifest Destiny [slides]

John MacKay – The Novelty of Film [slides]

5:00 Dinner Break

6:30 Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014, 169mins, 35mm)