Keynote & Conference

What We Desire: Critical Perspectives on Beauty, Pleasure, and Value

Fri, May 1, 2026

1:00 PM–8:30 PM

Rooms 8301-8304 at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave. Free and open to all. Register to attend.

Join us for the English Student Association (ESA) conference, What We Desire: Critical Perspectives on Beauty, Pleasure and Value on Friday, May 1, 2026 at the CUNY Graduate Center, featuring a keynote lecture “May Day Underground: On Festivity and Revolt” from Professor Jospeh Albernaz (Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University).

The ESA invites students across all departments and disciplines for a critical investigation into the question of desire through beauty, pleasure, and value. Among the questions this conference asks is, how is desire formed by the systems, memories, and material conditions through which value is produced, circulated, and lived? How does desire shape our understanding of value itself? We invite interdisciplinary, critical and/or creative approaches that examine the politics of desire and value.

Check back for the full schedule and more information soon.

This conference aims to explore some of the following themes:

Art, aesthetics, and authorship within capitalist structures
The pedagogy of values and desires
Biopolitics of pleasure and pain
Beauty and ugliness in environmental or ecological contexts
Speculations of value in time, memory, and inheritance
The relationship between the sensuous and the critical
(Re)claiming beauty, pleasure, desire

This conference is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the English Student Association (ESA), and the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council at the CUNY Graduate Center.