UVA English Graduate Conference 2013
“Subject to Change: Nature, Text, and the Limits of the Human”
Friday - Sunday . March 22-24
Monroe Hall
Official Schedule
**All room numbers refer to rooms in Monroe Hall, unless specifically noted otherwise
Friday, March 22
2:00 pm . Registration opens (Monroe Hall lobby)
3:00-4:15 . Panels (1)
1a. Room 116: “Stars, Sex, and Signs: Articulating Renaissance Materialism(s)”
William Rhodes, “Speculative Allegories”
Liz Steinway, “Complicating Chastity: Elizabeth I and Ermines in Book III of The
Faerie Queene”
Aaron Greenberg, “Life and Death Matters in the Renaissance”
1b. Room 134: “Poems and Things”
Mande Zecca, “The Combined Refraction of Everything Else: John Ashbery’s
Objects”
Joe Albernaz, “William Blake’s Apocalyptic Ontology: An Encounter Between
Blake and Object-Oriented Philosophy”
Kevin Holden , “Allotropic Series (Poetics, Ontology, Emergence)”
Tyler Babbie & Kateyln Kenderish, “Anthologizing the Landscape: Poetics of
Plants and Places”
4:30-5:45 . Panels (2)
2a. Room 116: “Human/Animal”
T. Nodin De Saillan, “Becoming-Other, More, Same : The Human-Other Alliance
and the Search for Identity in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore”
Ashley Faulkner, “Beastly Queer: The Unmanly Woolf”
Sharon Kunde, “Slimed!: Meshy Baptisms in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the
Fishhouses’”
Erica Schauer, “The Human Animal and the Polite Physicality in fin-de-siècle
Paris”
6:00 . Keynote Address by Professor Timothy Morton (Rice University)
“The Dark Side of the Household Object”
Monroe Hall, Room 130
9:30 . Conference Bar Night at Zocalo (on the Downtown Mall)
Saturday, March 23
8:00 am . Registration opens (Monroe Hall lobby)
9:00-10:15 . Panels (3)
3a. Room 124: “Conspicuous Object Consumption”
Harriet Calver, “Reality effects: Graham Greene’s Insincere Accessories”
Grace Tirapelle, “A Blueprint for Health: Spa Architecture and the Construction
of Middle-Class Subjectivity in The Road to Wellville”
Whitney DeVos, “Stilettos of Meat: Agency and the Ur-Fetish in Lara Glenum’s
‘Sign of the Goat [Icky’s Song]’”
3b. Room 134: “Ecopoetics”
Michelle Menting, “Residence Time—The Memory of Water: Poems”
John Trevathan, “The Mouth of Literature: Experimental Ecological Poetry in
Galicia”
Amanda Montei, “Transcorporeality & Ecological Critique in Hannah Weiner’s
The Fast”
Kaushik Viswanath, “Animating the Inanimate: An Ecological Reading of Arun
Kolatkar’s Poetry”
10:30-11:45 . Panels (4)
4a. Room 124: “The Romantic Corpus”
Jonathan Kerr, “‘throwing words away’: Lyrical Ballads and the Failure of
Enlightenment Anthropology”
Jacob Hughes, “Spontaneous Overflow: Wordsworth, Byron, and the Borders of
the Romantic Human”
Megan Quinn, “‘a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived’: The Word,
the Animal Body, and the Thing in Frankensteinand Transformation”
Adam Neikirk, “The ‘Inspired Charity-Boy’: Coleridge as Strange Stranger”
4b. Room 134: “Writing at the End, Life at the Limits”
Jacqueline A. Kellish, “‘What thou seest, is thyself’: Knowledge, Transcendence
and the Unity of Man and Nature in Radi Os”
Gary Grieve-Carlson, “‘No Greek will be able / to discriminate my body’: Charles
Olson’s Objectism and the Decentering of the Human Subject”
Kieran Quinlan, “Walker Percy, the Three Huxleys, and the Challenges of
Posthuman Subjectivity”
Christina Thyssen, “Post-traumatic McCarthy”
10:30 . Rare Book School Workshop
“The Lives of Books: Methods for Interpreting the Publication and Reception of Texts”
(meet in the lobby of Alderman Library; participation by prior arrangement only)
12:00 pm . Recess for Lunch
1:30-2:45 . Panels (5)
5a. Room 124: “Bodies Without End: Text and Flesh”
Ann M. Mazur, “Props in Victorian Parlour Plays: The Periperformative Object”
Barbora Novosadová, “Medium as an Extension of Human: Boundaries of the
Medias”
Jeroen Nieuwland, “Hybrid Contingencies: Entanglements of Expression, Text,
and Bodies in Conceptual Poetry”
João Paulo Guimarães, “Malleable Bodies and Unreadable Beings: Eduardo Kac
and Leslie Scalapino’s Poetics of Unnaming”
5b. Room 134: “Modeling Texts In and Out of History”
Nathan D. Frank, “Breeding Monsters Out of Nature: How Pedagogy of Inversion
Transforms Humanity in Diderot and Beyond”
Brad Baumgartner, “Apophatic Inorganicism: A Consideration of Thomas Ligotti
and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite”
Sand Avidar-Walzer, “Fragments and Scholia: Notes for a Darwinian History of
Philosophy”
Ted Scheinman, “Didaxis, Translation, and the ‘Natural’ in the Georgics:
Virgil & Dryden Under Fire”
3:00-4:15 . Panels (6)
6a. Room 124: “Life in Light of Science: Enlightenment Legacies”
Joe Fletcher, “Dead Souls: Priestley, Swedenborg, and the Challenge of
Materialism”
Adam Jason Miller, “Explaining the Supernatural: Radcliffe, Realism, and the
Ends of Science”
Lynn Cowles, “Playing Dress-Up: Scriblerian Satire on the Metaphysics of
Identity and Human Nature”
Elizabeth Bernath, “The Aesthetics of Scientific Alterity in Frankenstein”
6b. Room 134: “The Language and Politics of OOO”
Luther Cobbey, “VOO Do Ethics? What Could a Verb-Oriented Ontology Do for
Ethics?”
Justin Butler, “Objects, Poetics, Genetics: Thinking Codes and Rapports in Life
and Non-Life”
Abigail Lowe, “Common wealth and Common form: The Ethical Project of
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri”
Callum Ingram, “Democrats in Space: Critical Geography and Material Efficacy”
4:30-6:00 . Masterclass (Bruce Holsinger in conversation with Timothy Morton)
“When Sacred Texts Collide”
Room 130
6:00-8:00 . Reception in the Colonnade Club (Pavilion VII on the Lawn)
Sunday , March 24
8:00 am . Registration opens (Monroe Hall lobby)
9:00-10:15 . Panels (7)
7a. Room 124: “Complicating Separation: Human and Non-Human Others”
Valerie Henry, “Condemning Evidence: The Legal Life of Objects in A Passage to
India”
Angela Aliff, “The Senses Subvert: Kingsolver’s Avoidance of the Gaze in Prodigal
Summer”
Angela Passafaro, “Anthropocentric Imperialism and the Formation of the
Colonizer in Tarzan of the Apes”
7b. Room 134: “Making Bodies: The Human Machine”
Carlo Negri, “Posthuman, (Still) Too Human. Deleuze and the Posthuman
Subject: A Critical Comparison”
Wesley Dalton, “Falling Apart: Bodily Disintegration and Posthumanity in J.G.
Ballard’s Crash”
Scott Sundvall, “Prostechnics: The Originary Coupling of Prosthesis and
Technesis in Three Brief Acts”
Tereza Klimešová, “Objectifying Ourselves”
10:30-11:45 . Panels (8)
8a. Room 124: “Resonance and Reinvention”
Kenneth Lota, “How to Turn a Tragedy into a Comedy, and How to Turn a
Tragedy into More of a Tragedy: Christopher Moore’s Fool and Peter
Brook’s King Lear”
Victor Szabo, “Twilight Music, Resonant Records”
Brandon Walsh, “Sound Thinking: Narrative as Audible Event in Ulysses and
Molloy”
8b. Room 134: “Nature in Modernity: Reckoning the Anthropocene”
Jason Eversman, “Locating the Anthropos in the Anthropocene: Class Struggle &
Climate Change”
Stephanie Bernhard, “Literature and the Tone of Climate Change”
Ted Howell, “Make it Noö(sphere): Modernism and the Anthropocene”
Rob Welch, “The Natural Tools of Romanticism: The Reworking of Barren
Ground for Utility”
