FRIDAY
Abstracts by Panel, Friday morning
Abstracts by panel, Friday afternoon
Embassy Suites Guest Breakfast 7:30-8:30
Session IV 8:30-10:00
- A. Zombies! (Colonial East)
Chair: Clarence W. Tweedy, University of Mary Washington
Rosemary Millar, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, “Zomtopia: Remaking the Utopian Vision in Aaah!! Zombies”
Zebadiah Kraft, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, “Possibility in Destruction: Zombie Narratives of Renewal and Utopia”
Clarence W. Tweedy, University of Mary Washington, “The Happy Few: The Apocalypse and Resurgence of White Patriarchal Supremacy in Rob Kirkman’s The Walking Dead”
- B. Interrogating Social Class and Labor (Colonial West)
Chair: Graeme Pente, University of South Carolina Lancaster
Robert Seguin, Hartwick College, “The Symbolic Dimensions of Social Class in Mark McGurl and Ben Lerner”
Mackenzie Cox, American University, “Content Creation, Capitalism, and Coogan Law: Labor in the Age of Social Media”
Ryan Pine, Bryn Athyn College, “The Circle Was Closing, But Now It’s Just Every-where: Dave Eggers’s Fatalistic Ennui in The Every”
- C. Young Adult Dystopias: Cultural Contexts (Citadel North)
Chair: Elaine Ostry, SUNY Plattsburgh
Carrie Hintz, Queens College/CUNY and The Graduate Center/CUNY, “The Bad Boyfriends of YA Dystopia”
Carter Hanson, Valparaiso University, “Post-Nuclear Kinship Patterns in Young Adult Climate Dystopias: Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves”
Session V 10:15-11:45
- A. Making/Unmaking Utopian Possibilities Across Genres (Colonial East)
Chair: Phillip Wegner, University of Florida
In this panel, we will explore a variety of genres and aesthetic modes that seek to represent forms of utopian possibility. Each panelist will investigate a cultural object(s) that in some way signifies a type of making/unmaking dialectic. Nathan Stelari will discuss the utopian/dystopian ideological formation at play within ironic and meta-ironic political internet humor and how this informs the common sense of online political discourse. Ryan Kerr will present on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and how its dystopian themes (particularly in the novel’s final chapter) demonstrates Mark Fisher’s concept of “cancelled futures.” We hope to think collectively about the relationship between politics and form, especially in a moment beguiled by the apolitical.
Participants:
Ryan Kerr, University of Florida
Nathan Stelari, University of Florida
- B. Emily St John Mandel (Colonial West)
Chair: Claire Curtis, College of Charleston
Katrin Isabel Schmitt, University of Konstanz, Germany, “Picking up the Pieces: Rebuilding Community in Post-Apocalyptic Literature”
Ellen Rigsby, Saint Mary’s College of California, “Time Travel in Emily St. John Mandel’s The Sea of Tranquility”
Claire Curtis, College of Charleston, “Human artifice and living in a pre-made world: Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven”
- C. Crosscurrents of Utopian-Socialist and Marxist Thought in America’s Gilded Age (Citadel North)
Chair: Ashley Garcia, University of Texas at Austin
Ashley Garcia, University of Texas at Austin, “Association and Cooperative Colonies in the 1890s: The Utopian-Socialist Organizing of the BCC”
Daniel Joslyn, New York University, “When Love Came of Age: Marxism and Utopianism in Turn-of-the-Century Socialist-Feminist Thought”
Graeme Pente, University of South Carolina Lancaster, “Fourierism on a National Scale: Edward Bellamy Leads Visionary Socialism into Politics, 1878-1898”
Lunch on your own
Session VI 1:00-2:30
- A. Genre and Utopia (Colonial East)
Chair: Kenneth Roemer, University of Texas at Arlington
Braden Hammer, Mount Saint Mary’s University, “Len Deighton and the Utopian Genre Tradition”
Gib Prettyman, Penn State University, Fayette, “Utopian narrative labors in Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future”
Csaba Toth, Carlow University, “Collective Action and Community Building in William E. Trautmann’s Novel Riot”
- B. Utopian Thought (Colonial West)
Chair: Edward K. Chan, Waseda University
Peter Stillman, Vassar College, “Uncovering Le Guin’s Utopian Alternatives: The Left Hand of Darkness”
Mark Allison, Ohio Wesleyan University, “The Civil War in France: Karl Marx’s English Utopia?”
- C. The Child in Utopia (Citadel North)
Chair: Elaine Ostry, SUNY Plattsburgh
Elaine Ostry, SUNY Plattsburgh, “‘Nine on an Island, Orphans All:’ A Community of Children on Orphan Island”
Rachel L. Andreini, University of Kansas, “Educating the Romantic Child in News from Nowhere: Natural Forces in Utopian Reform”
Megan Weaver-Seitz, Asbury University, “A Lens of Hope: Children in Dystopian Films”
Session VII 2:45-4:15
- A. “Crafting Toward Utopia: Making and Unmaking with Zines” [Presentation and Demonstration] (Colonial East)
Chair: Carrie Hintz, Queens College/CUNY and The Graduate Center/CUNY
Brit Schulte, University of Texas, Austin
How do zines become objects that thought-smuggle, intervene, and disrupt? How can zines also create opportunities for us to play, feel, and prepare our hearts and minds? Are zine makers and distributors agents of the utopic, of radical composition? Join educator, community organizer, and zine maker Brit Schulte for a creative session, combining presentation, performative demonstration, and discussion. This will be an exercise in composition as Brit presents a constellation of zines that explore the medium’s potential for experimenting in utopian thought.
Brit Schulte is an Art History PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, a community organizer, and zinester. They study print objects, as well as sex working, queer and trans* histories. Their current organizing efforts involve criminalized survivors, prison/police abolition, and the decriminalization of sex work. Their writing may be found at The Funambulist, In These Times, Monthly Review, The Appeal, and Truthout.
- B. Always Renaming Utopian Studies: the Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Studies (Colonial West)
In April 2022, The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures, co-edited by Peter Marks (Sydney), Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (Penn State) and Fátima Vieira (Porto), arrived in the world. With 56 commissioned essays covering the contemporary vibrancy of utopian vision, and its resiliency as an idea, genre, and critical mode, the Handbook is a global, cross-disciplinary, and comprehensive volume. A selection of contributors will formally “launch” through a panel discussion of the editorial principles behind the organization of the volume, and the central themes guiding the range of new topics selected for inclusion. Given this year’s theme of “make, unmake, remake,” we hope that the publication of this latest volume can contribute to the conference-long discussion, as well as the interrogation of the principle of hope. We welcome a discussion with audience members on new directions.
Chair: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Penn State University
Participants:
Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Penn State University
Peter Marks, University of Sydney
- C. Dystopian Textualities (Citadel North)
Chair: Dominic Ording, Millersville University of Pennsylvania
Dominic Ording, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, “Banned”
Jill Craven, Millersville University, “Who’s Got a Match? Burning Down the House with David Byrne”
Session VIII 4:30-6:00
- A. Speculation in Time and Space (Colonial East)
Chair: Patricia Ventura, Spelman College
Robert Wood, University of California, Irvine, “The Mediocre Hobbyists of the Enterprise: Star Trek, Leisure, and Utopia”
Jenni Halpin, Savannah State University, “‘Meanwhile’ as ‘Otherwise’: Making the Past and Future in Copenhagen”
Thomas Horan, The Citadel, “The Surprisingly Secular Patriarchy in Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps”
- B. Global Migrancy (Colonial West)
Chair: Tricia Reagan, Randolph-Macon College
Jacqueline Shea, Arizona State University, “Harmonious Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contact and Creation in the Borderlands”
Tricia Reagan, Randolph-Macon College, “All that Glitters is Not Gold: The Jaula de Oro (Golden Cage) as a Dystopian Symbol in Migrant Narratives”