Worms for Brains: A Graduate Student Conference
Fri, Nov 14, 2025
10:00 AM–6:00 PM
This conference takes place in Martin E. Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to all. Please register to attend.
Join us for Worms for Brains, a graduate student conference that takes up “the worm” as a subject and paradigm for studying visual arts. Like a compost pile, where heterogeneous materials intermingle and decompose into nutrient-rich soil, the conference will combine varied perspectives from Art History, Arts Education, Film and Media Studies, Musicology, and Performance Studies. Panels will examine placemaking through participation, the worm’s-eye view, and critical methodologies as grunt. Presentations will wiggle between sonic, visual, and textual elements of worms, as a subject and as a theoretical springboard. This is an in-person event. Register here to join and to note any dietary requirements.
Conference Program
10:00-10:15: Worm Welcome: Opening Greetings
10:15-11:45 AM: Panel 1: Placemaking and Participation
- Emily Ruth Allen, Worms and Earworms: Sonic Placemaking in Sopchoppy, Florida’s Worm Gruntin’ Festival
- Amanda Horowitz, Return to the Slice: Worming Through the Canon and Iterative Theater
- Kathleen Quaintance, Silkworms for Brains
12:00-12:45: Lunch
1:00-2:30: Panel 2: Worm’s Eye View
- Lauren Ruiz, Soft Bodies in the Dark: On Invisible Labors and Tender Ecologies
- Lucas Gómez-Doyle, Movements that Glow: Eiko Otake & Radioactive Rhythm
- Vanessa Zarm, The Nonhuman “Worm’s-Eye View ” in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013)
2:45-4:15: Panel 3: Worm as Grunt
- Christine Negus, Boring Histories: Bookworms and Wormholes as Radical Black Praxis
- Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson, Beavers, Toads, Worms: Exemplary Animals Beyond Force or Figure
- Jiayu Yang, Wax Worms: The Parasites Across Hive, Archive, and the Internet
4:30-6:00: Keynote, Of Worms and Kings: Could Materialism Save the Humanities?
- Cassandra X. Guan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, The University of Chicago
Keynote
Cassandra X. Guan
Cassandra X. Guan is an Assistant Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is completing a book project titled Maladaptive Media: Animation in Interwar Culture that explores the plasticity of the living in the first age of its technical reproduction. With Adam O’Brien, Guan co-edited the Screendossier “Cinema’s Natural Aesthetics” (2020). Her essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like October (2021), Film-Philosophy (2024), Parapraxis (2025), World Picture (2025), South Atlantic Quarterly (2025), Ulrike Ottinger: Film, Art and the Ethnographic Imagination (2024), and The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media (2026).
6:00 PM: RECEPTION
This CUNY graduate student conference was organized by Araceli Bremauntz-Enriquez, Anahita Delcorde, Hannah Maier-Katkin, and Laura C. Suárez Rodríguez, with the guidance and support of faculty advisors Jennifer Ball and Claire Bishop.
The Worms for Brains Conference is co-sponsored by the PhD Program in Art History; the Center for the Humanities; the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council (DSCG); the Program in Comparative Literature Department at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Download the conference poster & program here:
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