Program

Monday 15 May, 2017: the Torrington Room, Senate House

13.00-13.30 Registration, coffee/tea, welcome

13.30-15.00 Panel 1: Resistance and Solidarity

Arthur Rose (Durham University), “South African Breathturns: Respiratory Aesthetics in Early Post-Apartheid Literature”

Anna Bernard (King’s College London), “‘That is: imperialismo’: International Solidarity and Literary Resistance”

15.00-15.30 Coffee/tea

15.30-17.00 Panel 2: Jews and Modernity

Lisa Silverman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), “New Totalitarianism and Age-Old Antisemitism: Lessons from Vienna”

Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), “The End of the End of Jewish Modernity: Trump and the Revitalization of the Public Sphere”

17.00-18.00 Wine reception

Tuesday 16 May, 2017: the Torrington Room, Senate House

9.00-9.30 Coffee/tea

9.30-11.00 Panel 1: Genealogies of Racial Violence

Denise Grollmus (University of Washington, Seattle), “Illiberal Readers and the Crisis of Free Speech: Blood Libel, Pizzagate, and the Rise of Ethnonationalism”

Nasia Anam (Williams College), “The Migrant as a Colonist: the Logic of Inversion in the Contemporary Dystopian Novel”

11.00-11.30 Coffee/tea

11.30-13.00 Panel 2: Aesthetics and Totalitarianism

Max Silverman (University of Leeds), “Concentrationary art and the reading of everyday life: (in)human spaces in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)”

Zoë Roth (Durham University), “Forms of Totalitarianism and the Totality of Form: Arendt, Aesthetics, and the State of Emergency”

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.00-15.30 Panel 3: Theorizing Totalitarianism

Neil Levi (Drew University), “Narrating the Present: Fascism, Post-fascism, and the Contemporary Political Imaginary”

Benjamin Schreier (Penn State), “Thinking About Identity in the Age of Trump”

15.30-16.00 Coffee/tea

16.00-17.30 Panel 4: Alternative Pasts and Possible Futures

Sasha Senderovich (University of Washington, Seattle), “From Stagnation to Trump and Back: Soviet Imagination and American Dystopia”

Bryan Cheyette (University of Reading), “The Plot Against Fiction: Philip Roth or Donald Trump”