Program

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19

Room 3335, Dwinelle Hall

10:30AM Registration & Coffee

11:15AM Opening Remarks

11:30AM GEOGRAPHIC FUTURES

  • Is the Rectum a Desert?: Queer Futurity, Architecture, and Discipline in Palm Springs, CA
    Xander Lenc (Geography, UC Berkeley)
  • Ajaxes across Space and Time: Traumatic Cartographies and CollapsedTemporalities in and beyond Sarajevo
    Nebojša Todorovic (Comparative Literature, Yale University)
  • The Speech Acts of Settler Decolonization: Incommensurability, Futurity, Urgency; or, The Grammars of Unsettlement
    Tim Wyman-McCarthy (Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)

1PM Lunch

2PM TECHNOLOGICAL MEANS, TECHNOLOGICAL ENDS

  • The Corpse of this World: Decay and Futurity
    Benjamin Crais (Literature, Duke University)
  • Paranoid Reading and Postwar American Poetry
    Eliot D’Silva (English, UC Berkeley)
  • “A Virus on Italian Media”: Speculations on Radical Television, Contagion, and Future Networks
    Rebecca Uliasz (Computational Media, Arts, and Cultures, Duke University)

4PM KEYNOTE: Professor Tavia Nyong’o

5:30PM Dinner

6:30PM POETRY READINGS & ARTIST TALKS

  • After Archimage Streams
    Jake Davidson (Media Studies, Al-Quds Bard College)
  • Poetry, including selections from little god; you open
    ren hlao
  • Poetry, including selections from East and West
    Laura Ritland (English, UC Berkeley)
  • The Practicality of Plasticization
    Lauren Ruiz (Art, Stony Brook University)

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20

Room 3335, Dwinelle Hall

9:30AM Breakfast

10AM NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE

  • Bad Trips to the Future: Dystopia on Drugs in the Italian Ottocento
    Gianna Albaum (Italian Studies, NYU)
  • “Like a Butterfly Caught in a Spider’s Web”: The Retrograde Sixties of Richard Kim
    Jeehyun Choi (English, UC Berkeley)
  • Post-Revolutionary Futures: Pedagogy and the time of everyday life
    Elias Kleinbock (Comparative Literature, Princeton University)

12PM PROPHECIES, SPECULATIONS, & ESCHATOLOGIES

  • The Black Absurd: Against the Conceptual Economy toward an Afro-Future of a Black Anti-Humanism
    John Gillespie (Comparative Literature, UC Irvine)
  • Keep the Future, Just Give Me the Money: The Technicity of Financial Derivatives and Wall Street Compensation Structures
    Jordan Sjol (Literature, Duke University)
  • Delinquent Divination: Uncanny Solidarity in the Undercommons
    Christopher Clarke (Comparative Literature, University of Chicago)

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Ishi Court (rain location: Room 3335, Dwinelle Hall)

1:30PM Lunch 

2:30PM PLANT & POSTHUMAN FUTURES (en plein air)

  • On the Possibility of Plant Knowledges
    Michael Song (Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley)

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Room 3335, Dwinelle Hall

3PM LIMITATIONS OF HISTORY

  • The Novel Without Us: Forms of Agency in the Anthropocene
    Spencer Robins (English, UCLA)
  • Ephemeral Dimensions: Epiphenomenal Time and Myth in Black Panther and Drexciyan Art
    Amanda Bennett (Literature, Duke University)
  • The Persistence of History Beyond Histories in Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy
    Ashwin Bajaj (Comparative Literature, UC Irvine)

5PM Closing Remarks
Dinner to follow

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