ACL(x) Schedule
All sessions take place in the Boardroom of the Nittany Lion Inn on the University Park campus of Penn State
Friday, 23 September
9:00 – 9:10 Welcome Remarks on Behalf of the Department of Comparative Literature: Robert R. Edwards (Head, Department of Comparative Literature) On Behalf of the College of Liberal Arts:
Dean Susan Welch (Dean, College of Liberal Arts)
9:00-10:40 a.m. Approaching the Arts of the Present
Organized by: Jonathan P. Eburne (Penn State University) and Amy J. Elias (University of Tennessee)
Brigid Cohen (New York University), “Ono in Opera: A Politics of Art and Action, 1960-1962”
Erica Edwards (University of California, Riverside), “On the Imperial Grammars of Blackness: African American Literature and the War Against Terror”
Tatiana Flores (Rutgers University), “Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago”
Marissa Lopez (University of California, Los Angeles), “The Xicano Future is Now: Poetry, Performance and Prolepsis”
Margaret Ronda (University of California, Davis), “Ends of the Earth: Scale and Symptom in Contemporary Ecologically-Oriented Arts”
Gloria Fisk (Queens College, CUNY), “Prolepsis and the Contemporary Present (No Alternatives)”
10:40-11:00 a.m. Coffee
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Reading Black Liquidity
Organized by: Alessandra Raengo (Georgia State University) and Lauren Cramer (Pace University)
Alessandra Raengo (Georgia State University), “The Stakes of Black Liquidity”
Lauren Cramer (Pace University), “Now, Let’s Get in Formation: The Liquidity of Black Social Life”
Michele Prettyman Beverly (Mercer University), “From HeLa to Eternity: The Metaphysical Liquidity of Black Female Embodiment”
Charles Linscott (Ohio University), “From Black Noise to Noisy Black: The Aesthetic Politics of a Liquid Sensorium”
12:30 – 1:30 p.m. Lunch – NLI Faculty Staff Club
Your conference nametag is your lunch ticket
1:30 – 3:00 p.m. Democracy as Cultural Practice: Concept, Media, and Literature
Organized by: Shuang Shen (Penn State University)
Mark William Westmoreland (Villanova University), “A Transversal Politics for Queer Democracy”
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder (University of Pittsburgh), “The Roots of Cultural Democracy in the Cooperative
Movement and the Rise of Mixed-Media Activism”
Esra Mirze Santesso (University of Georgia), “Democracy, Individualism, and the Islamic Novel”
Charlotta Salmi (University of Birmingham), “Graphic Democracy: Comics, Law and the State”
First Responder: Lea Pao (Penn State University)
3:00-3:30 p.m. Coffee
3:30-5:30 p.m. Alternative Literacies at the Nexus of African Literary Studies and African Feminisms: A Co-Panel of the ACL(X) and the African Feminist Initiative.
Organized by: Rose Jolly (Penn State University)
Susan Andrade (University of Pittsburgh), “Feminism, the Cold War, and Southern Africa: Rereading The Golden Notebook”
Kanika Batra (Texas Tech University), “Worlding Sexualities under Apartheid: From Gay Liberation to Queer Afropolitanism”
Njeri Githire (University of Minnesota), “Through a Woman’s Eyes: Contemporary African Cinema and Women’s Vision”
Kimingichi Wabende (University of Nairobi), “Deconstructing Gender Myths through Participatory Educational Theatre”
5:30 Doors open with cash bar, 6:30 buffet dinner with a 7:30 poetry reading by Abena Busia (Rutgers University) in Ballroom C
5:30 – 9 p.m. Reception and Banquet
Saturday, 24 September
9:00-10:30 a.m. Collaborative Pairings
Organized by: Thomas O. Beebee (Penn State University)
Anna Santucci (Brown University) and Patricia Sobral (Brown University), “Artful Pedagogy”
Amy Patterson (Moraine Park Technical College) and Melissa Yang (University of Pittsburgh), “Updates on a Multimodal, Multidisciplinary Collaboration”
Keiko Shimojo (Kyushu University) and Shingo Saito (Kyushu University), “Literature X Mathematics”
First responder: Aaron Rosenberg (El Colegio de México)
10:30-11:00 a.m. Coffee
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Globe, Planet, World: Comparison and the Problem of Disciplinary Scale
Organized by: Magali Armillas-Tiseyra and Anna Ziajka Stanton (Penn State University)
Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale University), “From World to Cosmos: The Long View from Early Modern to Postmodern”
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (Princeton/Waseda University), “English, Subculture, and the Unconscious of World Literature”
Crystal Parikh (New York University), “Where and What in the World is American Transnational Feminist Literature?”
Melissa Myambo (University of the Witwatersrand), “Global and Local Cultural Time Zones: Uneven
Development, Critical Geography, and Nested Micro-Spaces”
Matt Tierney (Penn State University), “A World of Incomparables”
12:30 – 1:30 p.m. Lunch – NLI Faculty Staff Club
Your conference nametag is your lunch ticket
1:30-3:00 p.m. Probing the Borders of Literariness.
Organized by: Jonathan Abel and Nicolai Volland (Penn State University)
Soelve I. Curdts (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf), “Reading: Allusions—Illusions—Elusions”
Nikolaus Wasmoen (SUNY Buffalo), “Literature as a Border State: Cybernetic Editing in the Marianne Moore Digital Archive”
Sergio Delgado (Harvard University), “A Theater of Displacement: Staging Activism, Poetry and Migration through a Transborder Immigrant Tool”
Nozomi Irei (Southern Utah University), ”’Désoeuvrement’ of Literary Studies”
First responder: Alexander Beecroft (University of South Carolina)
3:00-3:30 p.m. Coffee
3:30-5:00 p.m. Flash-Forward
At this non-conclusive concluding session, selected attendees will be asked to give “flash” summaries of what they have seen and heard, and ideas for the future.
Moderator: Caroline D Eckhardt (Penn State University)
First respondents: Gabeba Baderoon (Penn State University), Morgan Bozick (Penn State University), Juliana Chapman (Penn State University), Eric Hayot (Penn State University), Adhira Mangalagiri (University of Chicago), Lisa Ruch (Bay Path University), Aaron Rosenberg (Colegio De Mexico), Nicole Sparling (Central Michigan University)