Conference Schedule. February 13, 2009
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Listed below is the two-day schedule of events for (Media)tions: Translating the Body Politic. Please note that all room numbers are located in Susquehanna Hall.
Friday – February 27th, 2009
Welcome — 1:30PM (room 2117)
Coffee, registration, meet and greet
Session 1 — 2:00-3:15PM
Panel A (room 1121): Rhetoric in Circulation: Tracing the Paths of Discourse in the Public Sphere
Heather Brown (Maryland, English) – “Creating Spaces for Abortion Trauma: Genre, Testimony, and the World Wide Web”
K. Martin Camper (Maryland, English) – “Prayer and Place: Creating Sacred Places in Virtual Spaces”
Lindsay Dunne (Maryland, English) – “Public Cure/Counterpublic Cause: the Rhetoric of Environmental Hazard in the Breast Cancer Awareness Movement(s)”
Bryan Snyder (Maryland, Undergraduate, English) – “When Political Parties Change: an Examination of Changing Moral Structure in American Politics”
Panel B (room 1117): Visualizing the Body
Patricia Fancher (Georgetown University, English) – “Life through the Lens: Cyborg Subjectivity and Cinematic Hybridity”
Maria Gigante (Maryland, English) - “The Separation of Art and Text: Fitting Frontispieces into Early Modern Science”
Amy Karp (Maryland, English) – “Life and Death in the Liminal: Jenny Schecter’s Jewish Matters and The L Word“
Naliyah Kaya (George Mason University, Sociology) – “A New Deal for New Orleans: H.R. 4048: Gulf Coast Civic Works Act”
Session 2 — 3:30-4:45PM
Panel C (room 1121): Mediating Science: The Rhetoric of Scientific Discourse
Michelle Lang Boswell (Maryland, English) – “The Question of an Exclamation: Feynman’s Style in Six Easy Pieces“
Daniel J. DioGuardi (Maryland, English) – “‘Where Phenomena Tend to Collide’: Anzaldúa, Individuation, and (Sub)conscious (Border) Spaces”
Nathan Kelber (Maryland, English) – “From Archimedes to Robinson: The Rhetoric of the Infinitesimal”
Katherine Young (Maryland, English) – “Mary Anning’s Monster: Literature, Spectacle, and the Plesiosaur”
Panel D (room 1117): Pyrrhic Victories: Attempts to Narrativize the Unsayable of War
Lew Gleich (Maryland, English) – “Narrating the Simulacrum of War: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Courtney Angela Brkic’s Stillness“
James Hodapp (Maryland, English) – “Making the Present Livable: Positionality and the Unsayable in David Grossman’s See Under: Love and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried“
Porter Olsen (Maryland, English) – “Interruption War Interpretation: Arresting Narratives in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Seiffert’s The Dark Room“
Keynote — 5:00PM (room 1120)
Dr. Jonathan Gil Harris, Associate Professor of English, George Washington University
Mock Turtle Reading Series — 7:00PM
A reading by Maryland MFA students at Wonderland Ballroom in Columbia Heights, Washington, DC
Continental breakfast and coffee
Panel E (room 1117): Witnessing Mediation
Alexis Chema (Georgetown University, English) – “Coleridge’s Epistemology of the Sickbed”
D. Seth Horton (Maryland, English) – “When We Pigs Awaken”
Jeremy Metz (Maryland, Comparative Literature) - “When the experience of trauma is mediated by a complicit witness: Instabilities in literary witness positions and their implications for the ethical reader”
Laina Saul (George Mason University, Cultural Studies) – “Djamila Boupacha, Terrorist/Victim/Sign: Becoming Human Through Torture, Discourse and at the Boundaries of the Nation-State”
Panel F (room 1119): Technology, Abolitionism, and the Nineteenth Century Body Politic
Meaghan Fritz (Georgetown University, English) – “Uncle Tom Mania and the Body Politic”
Stacy Nall (Georgetown University, English) – “A Government of Future Citizens: Race, Gender and the Child in The Anti-Slavery Alphabet“
Cheryl Spinner -(Georgetown University, English) – “Competing Electricities: Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism and the Politics of ‘It’”
Sarah Workman (Georgetown University, English) – “Self-Shaping and World-Making: Angelina Grimké Weld’s Performances of Suffering”
Keynote — 11:30AM (room 1120)
Dr. Zita Nunes, Associate Professor of English and Director of Comparative Literature, University of Maryland
Lunch — 12:30-1:30PM (room 1121)
Join your colleagues for a catered lunch from Lebanese Taverna
Session 4 — 1:45-3:00PM
Panel G (room 1119): Poetry and (National) Identity
Lisa Kirch (Maryland, English) – “Pain and Potential within a Female Minstrel’s Song; The Triumph of Voice in Matilda Betham’s ‘The Lay of Marie’”
Rob Wakeman (Maryland, English) – “So Little Forgetting: The Robert Burns Memorial in Albany, N.Y.”
Amy Washburn (Maryland, Women’s Studies) – “Representing the ‘Real’ IRA: The Use of ‘Shout-outs’ in Eavan Boland’s ‘A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol’ and Roseleen Walsh’s ‘On Commedagh Hill’ as a Form of Irish Republican Remembrance”
Jennifer Williams (Maryland, English) – “A Courtly Love for the Twenty-First Century: Cyrus Cassell’s More Than Peace and Cypresses“
Keynotes Announced! December 11, 2008
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The GEO Conference committee is pleased to announce the keynote speakers for (Media)tions: Translating the Body Politic!
Dr. Jonathan Gil Harris (George Washington University) will kick-off the conference with an address at 5 PM on Friday February 27.
Day Two will feature an address at 11 AM by the University of Maryland’s own Dr. Zita Nunes.
Dr. Harris is Professor of English at George Washington University. His fifth book, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press this fall.
Dr. Nunes is Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Maryland. Her new book Cannibal Democracy:Race and Representation in the Literature of the America was released by University of Minnesota Press earlier this year.
We here at the committee are thrilled to welcome these accomplished and respected scholars to the conference.
Call for Papers and Panels. November 6, 2008
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(Media)tions: Translating the Body Politic
An Inter-Disciplinary DC Area Graduate Conference
Organized and Hosted by the University of Maryland Graduate English Organization
Deadline Extended–Abstract Submissions Due: 15 January 2009
Conference Date: 27-28 February 2009
Keynote(s): TBA
Our conference investigates the relationship between social discourses of the arts and sciences, social theory, and the human experience:
- In what ways are we affected by our use of the arts and sciences to translate our socio-political consciousness and experiences?
- In what ways have these discourses informed our status as subjects, as citizens, as humans?
- How have new media, new knowledge, and new audiences changed the way that we perceive or experience the body politic?
- Are there ethical limits on the ways we mediate these experiences?
- In what ways has the relationship evolved between these media (broadly construed as all aspects of transmission and publication) and our experiences?
To answer these and other questions, we invite the submission of panels and papers (250-350 word abstracts) from graduate students in the DC area. All fields, disciplines, and periods are welcome, and the presentations need not be in the traditional paper format-the use of film, music, visual arts or other media are encouraged. Panel submissions (3-4 people) are highly encouraged.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Media and the discourse of power
- Literature (or other media) and aesthetics of war
- The rhetoric of science in the public sphere
- Artistic scientists and scientific artists
- The history of the novel
- (Auto)biography, self as mediator
- Issues of canonization
- Identity politics: gender studies, colonial discourse, race theory, etc.
- Nationalist literatures and discourses
- Propaganda
- Censorship
- Satire and the ethics of representation
- Technology as mediator
- Social discourse in the age of globalization
- The rise (and fall?) of print culture
- Film and literature
Please submit abstracts of 250-350 words for panels and papers to: geoconference@gmail.com by 15 January 2009. Please articulate in your abstract how your presentation fits within the conference theme.
