Pioneer Vallery

Photo courtesy of Rickydavid under CC license

A SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

The English Department
at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The English Graduate Organization, EGO

The Graduate School

The College of Humanities
and Fine Arts

The Graduate Student Senate



 

 

7:30-8:00 
Registration, Coffee, Breakfast
(provided with conference admission)
Bartlett Lobby

 

8:00-9:20
SESSION ONE

Panel 1: The Performance of Pain: Representing Trauma in Fiction and Film

Chair: Professor Donald Maddox, Dept of French
Bartlett 127

  • Don’t Mean Nothing: Women’s Traumatic Experience in the Vietnam War” Ruth Lahti (English, UMass-Amherst)
  • “Writing Holocaust Post-memory to Screen: Jurek Becker’s Scriptwriting in Divided and Reunited Germany” Delene Case White (German, UMass-Amherst)
  • “Drowned in Performance: Witnessing Trauma in Derek Jarman’s Blue” Daniel Nevarez (Comparative Literature, UMass-Amherst)
  • Unlocking the Endings of Némirovsky’s “Tempête en juin” / “Storm in June” and Les chiens et les Loups / Dogs and Wolves” Lara Curtis (Comparative Literature, UMass-Amherst)

Panel 2:   Political Exigencies: Democracy in the Classroom and Protest in Performance

Chair: Amy Brady
Bartlett 131

  • “How Many Voices?” performed by Alan L. Bounville, Katie Czajka, Jamie M. Mayer (New York University)
  • “Performing Loss in Ralph Lemon’s ‘Come Home Charley Patton’” Kajsa K. Henry (English, UMass-Amherst)
  • “Deliberately Democratic: Performing Citizenship in a Public Speaking Class” Hari Stephen Kumar (Communication, UMass-Amherst)

9:30-10:50
SESSION TWO

Panel 1: Will on the Stage: Performing/Performative Shakespeare, Melville, MacMillan and Preljocaj

Chair: Arthur Kinney
Bartlett 125

  • “A Stage in Three Acts: Rewriting Performativity Through Melville and Shakespeare”
    • The Psychological Stage: performed by Kacie Fodness (English, UMass-Boston)
    • The Physical Stage: performed by Jesse Priest (English, UMass-Boston)
    • The Social Stage: performed by Shanna O’Berry (English, UMass-Boston)
  • “Overhearing While Doing: Hamlet’s Performative Acts” Fredrik deBoer (Writing and Rhetoric, University of Rhode Island)
  • “Playing Dead: Dancing Necrophilia in MacMillian’s and Preljocaj’s Romeo and Juliet” Brandon Shaw (Comparative Literature, UMass-Amherst)

Panel 2: Cultural, Social, and Literary Materializations of Law and Legal Performances

Chair: Greg Sargent
Bartlett 127

  • “Textual Performance in Kafka’s The Trial” Jason Ciaccio (Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center)
  • “The Performativity of Pop Law on Judge TV: Learning from Judge Judy” Sarah Kozinn (Performance Studies, New York University)
  • “Performing American Divorce: A Consideration of Performance and Divorce in 19th Century Society and Literature” Sarah Elaine Magin (English, UMass-Amherst)

Panel 3: Body Trouble: Performing Gender, Race, and Subjecthood

Chair: Kate Walker
Bartlett 131

  • “Gender Performativity and Roles: Thomas Jefferson’s Double Standards for Women” Naomi Fosher (University of Rhode Island)
  • “Corporeal Horrors: What Frame Narratives Can Tell Us about Victorian Anxiety” Ashley Nadeau (English, UMass-Amherst)
  • “Wilde and His Puppets: (dis)Embodying Queer Subjecthood” Elise Swinford (English, UMass-Amherst)
  • “Formation of an Ultimate Self in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre” Megan Webb (University of Colorado-Denver)

11:00-12:30: “PERFORMANCE AND POLITICS”

A roundtable discussion with faculty from the five colleges
Bartlett 316

Jenny Spencer (English, UMass), Ellen Kaplan (Theatre, Smith College), Claudio Moreira (Communication, UMass), Stephen Olbrys Gencarella (Communication, UMass)

 

12:30-1:30 LUNCH
(provided with conference admission)
Bartlett Lobby
                       

1:30-2:50
SESSION THREE

Panel 1: Musicals, Marriage, and Medieval Drama: Performance and Performativity in the Theater

Chair: Harley Erdman
Bartlett 127

  • “‘Everyone’s a Hero in Their Own Way’: Problems and Possibilities Performing the Superhero Body in Musicals” Donatella Galella (Theater, CUNY Graduate Center)
  • “Performing Medieval Drama: An Act of Translation or of Transformation?” Valerie Gramling (English, UMass-Amherst)
  • “A New Normal: Next to Normal and the American Musical ‘Marriage Trope’” Jason Lites (Theater, UMass-Amherst)
  • “Performing Marriage in Fabliaux” Patricia Sokolski (CUNY Graduate Center)

                       
Panel 2: Movement and Gesture in Dance and Literature

Chair: Neelofer Qadir
Bartlett 65

  • “The Everyday Rasa” performed by Berit E. Nowicki (New York University)
  •  “Affects of Blending and Perspective on the Performance of Gesture in Narrative Fiction” Neal Utterback (Theater and Drama, Indiana University)
  • “Performative Language and Movement: Dancing Another Culture/Speaking another Language” Selma Trevino (Performance Studies, New York University)
  • “Awake in the Mourning” performed by Brandon Shaw (Comparative Literature, UMass-Amherst) and Ariel Cohen (Dance, Smith College)

 

Panel 3: Maternal Performance and the Performativity of Motherhood

Chair: Kate Kohler Amory, Assistant Professor of Movement, Salem State University
Bartlett 125

  • “The Disidentified Mother” performed by Kate Kohler Amory
  • “For Art’s Sake: Fashioning a Mother: From Obsession to Abandonment in Lois Gould’s Mommy Dressing and Jean Nathan’s The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll” Heather Brown (CUNY Graduate Center)
  • “« Je suis grosse de quatorze mois ! »: Arlequin’s Pregnant Drag, from La Comédie Italienne to Nacho Mama” Kristin Adele Graves (French and African American Studies, Yale University)
  • “Reading the Heterogeneity of Big Bertha: Monstrosity, Maternal Body, Machine” Kirsten Kaschock (Dance, Temple University)

 
3:00-4:20
SESSION FOUR

Panel 1: Literary and Cultural Performances in the Twentieth Century

Chair: Daniel Biegelson
Bartlett 125

  •  “The Experience of Performativity in the Confessional Narrative of White Noise” Ryan Everitt (CUNY Graduate Center)
  • “Andrew Ramsay Disfigured” Jeffrey Covington (English, Brown University)
  •  “Melle Mel in the Megaplex: Postmodern Performance and Public Space in Krush Groove and Beat Street” Casey Hayman (English, UMass-Amherst)
  • “Postcolonial Performativity: Pursuing the Dominant and Performing Hegemonic Ticks” Angie A. Lalla (St. John’s University)

 

Panel 2:  Forming Publics, Finding Audiences

Chair: Linh Dich
Bartlett 127

  • “Mark Twain and Hank Morgan: Performance in A Connecticut Yankee” Lisa McGunigal (University of Virginia)
  • “The Posture of Contour: A Public Primer” James Belflower (SUNY Albany)
  • “Critiquing the ‘Daxumentary’: Documentary Modes of Self-Representation in Online Video” Robert LeBlanc (University of Rhode Island)
  • “Low Self-Esteem and the Power of Negative Thinking” Joseph Berenguel (English, UMass-Amherst)

4:30: Meet in Bartlett Lobby to walk to reception

4:45-7:00:
RECEPTION at University Club
(provided with conference admission)

7:00-?
Please join us for informal dinner and post reception festivities
at Amherst Brewing Company's upstairs bar.
(Located in the middle of town,
and a 15 minute walk from the University Club.)