tired bodies, tired worlds
an interdisciplinary graduate student conference
Department of English, University of Chicago
November 15-16, 2018
The Franke Institute for the Humanities
Conference Program
To protect our colleagues with chemical sensitivities, we are asking for your cooperation in helping create a scent-free environment.
Thursday, November 15
9:30-10:15: Conference registration
10:15 – 10:30: Opening Remarks
10:30 – 12:00pm: Refusal and Recuperation
Chair: Dr. Sophia Azeb, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English
- Garments Against Women’s Noninformational Lyric
Dandi Meng: PhD Student, Department of English, UCLA - Black, Blue, Blur: Reading the Ellipsis in John Keene’s “Blues”
Rebekah Waalkes: PhD Student, Department of English, Tufts University - “Rising out of a pile of trash”: Economy and Disposability in Eric Gansworth’s Smoke Dancing
Andy Lindquist: PhD Student, Department of English, University at Buffalo
12:00 – 1:00pm: Lunch (provided)
1:00 – 2:30pm: Structuring Exhaustion and Exhausting Structures
Chair: Jordan Pruett, PhD Student, Department of English
- Suspended Declension: Dead Labour, Monumentality, and Automation
Devin Wangert: PhD Student, Visual & Environmental Studies Department, Harvard University - Overworked and Overfitted: Algorithmic Exhaustion in Computational Aesthetics
Gary Kafer: PhD Student, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago - One-Dimensional Exhaustion: Marcuse and the Economism of Thought
Nica Siegel: PhD Candidate, Political Theory, Yale University
2:40 – 4:10pm: Endurance and the Politics of Chronicity
Chair: Tien-Tien Jong, PhD Student, Department of Cinema & Media Studies
- Illness and Labor in Bob Flanagan’s The Pain Journal
Adam Mitts: PhD Student, Department of English, University at Buffalo - Bad Habits Die Slow: Numbing and Exhaustion in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and “Dear Mama”
Xindi Li: PhD Student, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz - Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying
Taraneh Fazeli: Curator-in-residence, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art
4:10 – 4:30pm: Coffee break
4:30 – 6:00pm: In the Era of Exhaustion: Political Undercurrents and Critical Hope
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris
Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies and Director of the Global South Center (GSC) at Pratt Institute.
6:00 – 7:00pm Keynote reception (light refreshments provided)
Friday, November 16
8:00am: Twenty Minute Still: morning meditation at Bond Chapel
*meeting place and time to be announced
9:00 – 10:30am: Archives of Absence and Loss
Chair: Bellamy Mitchell, PhD Student, Committee on Social Thought and Department of English
- Her Black is Woman, Her Story Untold: Narrative Displacement as Ethical Absence in Maryland Police Reports
Gabrielle Bozarth: Legal Assistant, White and Case LLP - Despair, “The Awakening,” and Environmentalism in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah and Amour by Marie Vieux-Chauvet Zach Torp: PhD Student, English Literature and Media Arts, USC
- Disposable Fictions in Jamie Berrout’s Incomplete Stories and Essays
Tony Wei Ling: PhD Student, Department of English, UCLA
10:45 – 12:00pm: Laboring Imaginations
Chair: Steven Maye, PhD Candidate, Department of English
- Made Future: William Blake’s Political Ecology
John Patrick James: PhD Student, Department of English, UC Berkeley - Dispossession and Reproductive Labor in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus
Robert Mendoza: PhD Student, Department of English, UCLA
12:00 – 12:45pm: Lunch (provided)
12:45 – 1:45pm: Self-care: an untapped value proposition
A workshop moderated by Julie Edwards, Director of Health Promotion and Wellness and Rachel Kyne, Postdoctoral Humanities Teaching Fellow in English
2:00 – 3:15pm: Faculty Roundtable
Benjamin Morgan, Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago; Director of Undergraduate Studies
Kelly Wisecup, Associate Professor of English at Northwestern; Director of Undergraduate Studies; Co-Director of Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research
Corey Byrnes, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Culture at Northwestern University; Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Environmental Humanities Workshop
3:15 – 3:45pm: Coffee break
3:45 – 5:15pm: Choreographies of Release and Relief
Chair: Evan Pensis, PhD Student, Department of Music
- Survival as Nightlife: The Awakening Glamour of Kia LaBeija
Hilary Rasch: PhD Student, Department of English, Brown University - “I need to tire my body”: Exhaustion and the Political Economy of Nightlife in Lagos (Nigeria)
Chrystel Oloukoï: PhD Student, African and African American Studies (primary field: Anthropology, secondary field: Critical Media Practice), Harvard University - Dancing through Exhaustion: How NIC Kay’s ‘GET WELL SOON’ Seeks Wellness in White Spaces
Rosalia Lerner: PhD Student, Critical Dance Studies, UC Riverside
6:00pm: Graduate student pizza party
Contact us at exhaustion.uchiconference@gmail.com