The students of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Italian Specialization at The Graduate Center, CUNY, present the annual interdisciplinary conference, this year titled Reading Terror: Representations and Resistance. This conference asks: What is the nature of terror? How have representations, definitions and our understanding of terror changed over time? How is terror used aesthetically, politically and socially? How is terror translated textually and visually? What are some of the modes of resistance to terror, through literature, art, and the media? We invite papers from all disciplines and fields focusing on works from any period.
Keynote Speaker: Robin Wagner-Pacifici, University in Exile Professor of Sociology, The New School.
The CFP and other information can be found at https://readingterror.wordpress.com/about/
Conference Schedule
Thursday, November 5
9:00am – 10:00am
DSC Rooms – Registration
Room 4116 (Comp Lit Lounge) – Breakfast
10:00am – 11:30am
Rooms C204/205 – Welcome Panel – “Constructing and Inhabiting the Spaces of Terror”
· Matthew Armstrong (Independent Researcher) – “Reading the GWOT: The Relationship between the Global War on Terror and Global Literacy.”
· Shaza Elsheshtawy (The New School for Social Research) – “Cairo’s Ashwa’iyyat: Informal Settlement Formation & the (Discursive) Construction of Terror.”
· Sally Sharif (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “The Aesthetics of Jihad: A Study of Videos Released by the Islamic State.”
· Hamza Muhammad Iqbal (Habib University) – “Karachi and Terror.”
11:45am – 1:15pm
8301 – “Terror Today”
· Peter M. Boudreau (Tufts University) – “Touch Me in the Morning: Finding Community in Ron Athey’s Dissociative Sparkle.”
· Vincent Sallé (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Can terror be funny?”
· Anne-Gabrielle Roussel (Brown University) – “French government’s fight against terrorism: the website stop-djihadisme.gouv.fr”
8304 – “Turning Terror into Text”
· Ruth Riftin (University of Virginia) – “The Transmission of Terror: How the Witnesses of the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre turn their horrific experiences into text.”
· Noni Carter (Columbia University) – “Archiving Terror and the Slave Sublime: Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women and its contribution to the politics of remembering.”
· Malte Fabian Rauch (The New School for Social Research) – “An Aesthetic of Remembrance: Representing Atrocity in the Novel.”
· Dolores Resano (University of Barcelona) – “9/11, Hero-cops and Counter-discourse in Jess Walter’s The Zero.”
8400 – “Terror on the Stage”
· James Rumsey-Merlan (Princeton University) – “Stage Fright.”
· Enzo Vasquez Toral (Princeton University) – “Brazilian Theater under Dictatorship and the Shinning Path: Reading Brechtian Influences as Inspiration and Response to Terror in Theatrical Discourse.”
· Maria-Cristina Necula (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Raising the Iron Curtain: The Bucharest Opera Resistance.”
1:15pm – 2:15pm
Lunch Break
2:15pm – 3:45pm
8301 – “Terror and the Body”
· Rebeccah Leiby (Boston University) – “Sublime Terror and the Danger of Serenity.”
· Daniela Jiménez (University of California, Los Angeles) – “‘Every Time a Corpse Enters the Picture…’: Gothic and Evitamania in Santa Evita.”
· Colin Burns (Fordham University) – “Performing the Body in Pain: Body Art in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man.”
8304 – “Terror and Trauma”
· Diviani Chaudhuri (SUNY Binghamton) – “Reading the Landscape of Terror in Partitioned Nations: India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine.”
· Kaitlyn Martin Fox (Boston University) – “Wstawàch: Reading Terror as Awakening to the Unclaimed Past in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening.”
· Laurel Billings (University of Michigan) – “9/11’s Queer Poetics: Radical Love and Everyday Loss W.H. Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’ and Claudia Rankin’s ‘Don’t Let Me Be Lonely’.”
8400 – “The Revolutionary Spirit of Terror”
· Luis A. Lei (The New School for Social Research) – “Absolute Freedom and Revolutionary Terror in China.”
· Yannleon Chen (University of Arizona) – “The Different Faces of Terror: Facets of Violence and Terror in the RAF and BRD.”
· Nick Olson (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “TBD”
4:00pm – 5:30pm
8301 – “Terror in Latin America”
· Philip Johnson (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Exceptional State to Caliphate: the Journey of a Symbol.”
· Ruth Halvey (Princeton University) – “Countering Narco Theatricality: Photojournalism and the Corpse in Contemporary Mexico.”
· Andrea Adhara Gaytán Cuesta (Rutgers University) – “De la mano peluda a la Santa Muerte: Zombies, Death, Bodies and collective fear in Mexican daily life.”
8304 – “Existential Terror”
· Zunaira Yousaf (Independent Researcher) – “Terror and the Self.”
· Paula Libfeld (The New School for Social Research) – “Disrupting the Instant: Levinas and Ethical Representations of the Holocaust.”
· Marc Rickenbach (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Tone-Deaf Subjects, Overhearing Noise: Robbe Grillet’s Jealousy and Heidegger’s Hebel.
8400 – “Memorializing (Victims of) Terror”
· Ruichuan Wu (University of Pennsylvania) – “Pyramid of Skulls (Jingguan): Ritualizing Terror in Early Chinese Military Culture”
· Senem Guler-Biyikli (University of Pittsburgh) – “Away From the National Memorials: Narrative and Form at the Local 9/11 Memorials.”
5:30pm – 6:00pm
Afternoon Break
6:00pm – 7:30pm
Room C202 – Keynote Event – Robin Wagner-Pacifici
7:30pm – 8:30pm
Room 4116 – Evening Reception
Friday, November 6
9:00am – 10:00am
Room 4116 (Comp Lit Lounge) – Breakfast
10:00am – 12:00pm
The Segal Theater – CUNY Faculty Panel
· Giancarlo Lombardi (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
· Monica Calabritto (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
· Richard Wolin (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
· Charity Scribner (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
· Moderator: Bettina Lerner (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Lunch Break
1:15pm – 2:45pm
8301 – “Pop Terror”
· Sarah Yurch (Independent Researcher) – “The Danger Zone: Terrorism and Zany Comedy in Archer.”
· James M. Kopf (Pennsylvania State University) – “’I am reality’: Terror, Transgression, And Displacement In The Aesthetics Of The Butthole Surfers.”
· Heath Pearson (Princeton University) – “White Flesh in Terror.”
· Patrick Kent Russell (University of Connecticut) – “Disarticulating Domestic Terrorism and Crimes against Corporate Property through Popular Entertainment.
8304 – “Terror, Horror and the Sublime”
· Steph Buongiorno (West Virginia University) – “Toward a Theory on the Terror of Horror.”
· Heather J. Macpherson (Worcester State University) – “Poetic Terror & the Sublime: Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’, Lewis’ Antonia & Pictorial Art in the Media.”
· Leah Becker (New York University) – “‘I am nothing’: Sublime Insanity in Edgar Allan Poe.”
· Emily O’Rourke (UC Berkeley) – “Between the terrible and the horrible: The dialectics of ‘delight’ in Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967).”
8400 – “La Terreur“
· Christine Carter (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Le Fantastique et La Violence dans La femme au collier de velours et Les Mille et Un Fantômes d’Alexandre Dumas père.”
· Tamara Brown (Queens College) – “The Sublime Turn: The Logic of Terror and Hope for Liberation.”
· Laura Broccardo (Duke University) – “Representing that which is Inconceivable: Germaine de Staël versus Terror.”
· Justyna Czader (Purdue University) – “Between Law and obedience. Women’s political resistance in prison letters and memoirs during the Reign of Terror.
3:00pm – 4:30pm
8301 – “Terror: Storytelling the Ineffable”
· Gareth Mandin (University of Ottawa) – “Indigeneity and Terror: Indigenous Existence and Settler Existentialism”
· Dominik Zechner (New York University) – “Mocked By Death: Kafka and the Terrors of Narration.”
· Jerilyn Sambrooke (UC Berkeley) – “‘Calm down, you’re just paranoid’: Terror, Paranoia, and Critique in Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist.”
· Alberto Gelmi (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “A broader Levi: the atomic threat and the author of Se questo è un uomo.”
8304 – “Faces of Terror”
· Erika Lorenzana Del Villar (University of Connecticut) – “The Forgotten Face of Fear: Female Terrorists and the Gendered Politics of Terrorism.”
· Muhammad Waqar Azeem (Binghampton University, SUNY) – “Dialogue, Media and Terror.”
· Jonathan Liebembuk (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Cuteness & Terror: ‘Suspect #2 is Cute’.”
· Saiful Saleem (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Disrupting The Racial Politics of Radicalization and Terror(ism) through A rebours.”
8400 – “Transformative Terror”
· Lucy Hall (University of St. Andrews) – “‘A Hyperbole of Heat and Terror’: Fear and the Gothic Psyche in Rumer Godden’s Breakfast with the Nikolides.”
· Ryan Gilligan (Fordham University) – “Demonic Possession and Grace: Understanding Terror in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away”
· Sunshine J. Dempsey (University of South Carolina) – “Southern Terror: Horror and Abjection in Contemporary Representations of Southern Identities.”
4:30pm – 5:00pm
Afternoon Break
5:00pm – 7:00pm
Room 4116 – Evening Reception and Closing Remarks
Cosponsored with the Department of Comparative Literature and the Doctoral Students Council.
