Thing[s] Matter

Click here to download our conference program. (revised 2.22.08)

Schedule of Events

Thursday, March 13th

10:00am
           South Meeting Room, Newcomb Hall  —   “Lost and Found”

• Paul Legault, University of Virginia, “‘Poetic Run-off’: Collage-work in the ‘Found Poetry’ of Bern Porter’s Wastemaker”
• Sarah Bishop, University of Virginia, “Footage Fetish: the Index, the Object, and the Return of the Real”
• Shaun Cullen, University of Virginia, “Punkrockontology: The Object World of Alex Cox”

           Honor Trial Room, Newcomb Hall  —   “Object Matters in 18th-C. British Literature”

• Jessica Barrett, University of Virginia, “Person, Place, and Thing: Owning Clarissa”
• Kate Middleton, Georgetown University, “The Traveled Thing”
• Madigan Keegan Haley, University of Virginia, “Muffled Values: Objects, Credit, and Secular Time in Tom Jones”

12:00pm
           South Meeting Room, Newcomb Hall  —  “Texts and Technology”

• Gabriel Hankins, University of Virginia, “The Real Textual Critical ‘Thing’ in Henry James”
• Brian Chappell, Georgetown University, “Scrolls, Tape Recorders, and the Spoken Word: Towards a Dialogic Reading of Kerouac’s ‘Road’ Novels”
• PC Fleming, University of Virginia, “Children's Books: Works or Documents? The Case of Peter Parley's Tales of America”

           Honor Trial Room, Newcomb Hall  —  “19th-C. Object Matters”

• Emily Madsen, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, “Bleak House’s Black Doll: Neglected Specter of the Atlantic”
• K. Irene Rieger, Case Western Reserve University, “The ‘Thingness’ of Nineteenth Century Nostalgia”
• Christen Mucher, University of Pennsylvania, “That peculiar cake: Bartleby in the Context of US-Caribbean History”
• Eugenia Gonzalez, The Ohio State University, "'Scarcely a Thing': The After-Life of Matter in Vernon Lee's 'The Doll'"

2:00pm
           South Meeting Room, Newcomb Hall  —   “20th-C. American Literature”

• Matthew Lambert, University of South Alabama, “West, the Masses, and the Un-'Imaginative Proximity of Social Revolution' in The Day of the Locust" 
• Liz Twitchell, Yale University, “‘Somehow when I own a book, it’s almost like I read it’: Art, Objecthood, and Forgery in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions”
• Scott Selisker, University of Virginia, “Invisible Man, Psychology, and the Figuration of Identity”

            Honor Trial Room, Newcomb Hall   —   “19th-C. Literature and Science.”

• Jeremy Smyczek, University of North Carolina Wilmington, “That Dog Won’t Hunt: Voyage of the Beagle and Darwin’s Rhetoric of Renunciation”
• Greta Lynn, University of Pennsylvania, “Subjects, Objects, Things: Melville’s Bartleby and Nineteenth-Century Psychology”
• Walt Hunter, University of Virginia, “Shelley, Swinburne, and the Endorsement of Reality”

4:00pm
           South Meeting Room, Newcomb Hall  —   “Ethnic American Landscapes”

• Sean Borton, University of Virginia, “Returning to the Site of Loss: Re-reflections on Uranium Pit-Mines in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead”
• Gwen Kordonowy, University of Virginia, “Birthrights: Mapping Inheritance and Citizenship onto Urban Landscapes”
• Megan Haury, “‘Only Americans Could Have Done It’: Materiality and National Identity in China Men”

6:00pm
Keynote Address:
Bill Brown, Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Prof., University of Chicago.
~Reception to follow~

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Friday March 14th

10:00am
           Board Room, Newcomb Hall  —    “Modernist Objects and Experimentation”

• Christopher McVey, University of Virginia, “'Making this Thing Other': Crisis and Modernism in David Jones’s The Anathemata”
• Chris Forster, University of Virginia, “Iron Beds and Red Slippers: Walter Sickert’s Camden Town Nudes and the Role of the Object in the Passage from Art to Pornography”
• Saffron Hall, University of Virginia, “Things in Circe”
• Elizabeth Sheehan, University of Virginia, "Refashioning the Harlem Renaissance: Clothing, Race, and Material Modernism"

           Honor Trial Room, Newcomb Hall   — “Medieval Things”

• Jeffrey Tinley, The Ohio State University, “Transforming the Things of Pilgrimage”
• Christine Schott, University of Virginia, “The Clothes Make the Man, Or the Monster: Illustrations of the Marvels of the East”
• Gabriel Haley, University of Virginia, “Hermits and Stuff”

12:00pm
           Board Room, Newcomb Hall  —   “Communities, Identities, and Objecthood”

• Elizabeth Broadbent, University of Virginia, “Symbolic Capital, Controversy, and Mycenae”
• Jane-Erie Shrestha, Radford University, “‘A New Woman’: Markandaya and Feminism”
• Rosemary Millar, University of Virginia, “An Oven and Cellar Floor: Keeping It Practically Sacred in Toni Morrison’s Paradise”
• Mike Spiegel, University of Virginia, “Margaret Atwood’s New Medievalist Dystopia”

           Honor Trial Room, Newcomb Hall  — “Renaissance Objects”

• Michael Ferrier, Georgetown University, “Privies and Property: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance”
• Perry D. Guevara, Georgetown University, “Desdemona’s Dildo: Gender Queerness and Fetish in Othello”
• Jessica Held Martin, Clemson University, “Fashion Faux Pas: Domestic and International Anxiety in Volpone”

2:00pm
           Board Room, Newcomb Hall  — “Things Today”

• Seth Perlow, Cornell University, “Technostalgia and the Phenomenology of Digital Belief”
• Jason Barr, James Madison University, “The Ubiquitous iDentity and the Lessened Self in a Patriot Act America”
• Annah Mackenzie, University of Michigan, “‘Home is the Most Important Place in the Word’: Reading Gender, Space, and Culture through IKEA”

           Honor Trial Room, Newcomb Hall   —   “Housekeeping”

• James Weddup, University of Virginia, “‘Half Woman/Half House’: Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Femmes Maisons’ and Angela Carter”
• Laura DeFurio, Villanova University, “The Extremes of Feminine Limitation: Material Economy in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping”
• Kat Bodrie, University of North Carolina Wilmington, “The Deployment of Sexuality in a Society of Marital Possession: Angel’s Love and Alec’s Sexual Possession of Tess in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles”

4:00pm
Master Class:   The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/
Hoyt N. Duggan, University of Virginia.

Bryan Hall , The Bowers Library

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