Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Editor, Penn State University Christian Haines, Associate Editor, Penn State University Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Assistant Editor, Texas A&M University, Kingsville K. Allison Hammer, Contributor, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Assistant Professor of English, Texas A&M University, Kingsville
Dr. Stephanie Peebles Tavera is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, Kingsville. She is the author of (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). She is also the author of the critical... Read More →
Edward Chan, Waseda University Twenty-First Century Geisha Masquerades and the Gaijin Discount: Negotiating White Racial Capital in Japan Hyerin Shin, Waseda University A Hope Translated: The Desire for Westernization as Enlightenment in Early Korean and Japanese Translations of Utopian Texts Shinske Iwata, Aichi University Considering the Utopianization of Race/Ethnicity in Japan's Travel Media
Chair: John Barberet, Polk State College ● Hannah Rudderham, University of Ottawa Searching for Alternatives in Progressive-Era Canada: Recovering Alice Chown as a Utopian Activist ● María Sierra, Universidad de Sevilla/University of Seville (Spain) Transitar de lo gitano a lo romaní, performar una utopía post-racial: el caso de Ionel Rotaru (1960s-1970s) /Transiting from ‘Gypsy’ to Roma, performing a post-racial utopia: the case of Ionel Rotaru (1960s-1970s) ● Pawel Maciejko, he/him, Johns Hopkins University Messianic Utopia of Sabbatai Tsevi
Chair: Thomas Horan, The Citadel ● Zoe Keating, she/they, York St John University Perceptions of Utopia in Fahrenheit 451 ● Sarita Deleon-Garza, Texas A&M University, Kingsville Where Have All the Martyrs Gone? Linguistic Complacency in the Face of Oppressive New World Order in Augustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh ● Murielle Perrier, Princeton University Malagasy Legends and Contemporary Political Struggles: Language, Political Discourse, and the Quest for Utopia in Raharimanana’s Writing
Chair: Francisco José Martínez Mesa, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
● Antonio Catrileo, University of California Cuir/Queer Critical Juxtapositions: Epupillan Resurgence in Pikunmapu/Qullasuyu ● Manuel Carrión-Lira, University of California, San Diego Mapulectical Adjustments in Chileyem, an Experimental Mapuche Film Program (2020) ● Ernesto Cuba, University of Washington Spanish language Homosaurus: Challenges and opportunities of Internet-linked LGBTQ vocabulary ● Javier Muñoz-Díaz, Farmingdale State College The Children of Chuquichinchay: Reclamation of Indigenous Heritage in Contemporaneous Peruvian Queer Art
Chair: Juan Pro, EEHA/IH, CSIC, Seville ● Juan Pro, EEHA/IH, CSIC, Seville ● Francisco José Martínez Mesa, Universidad Complutense de Madrid ● Julia Ramirez-Blanco, Universidad Complutense de Madrid ● Elisabetta Di Minico, Universidad Complutense de Madrid ● Iria Gómez del Castillo Dávila, Instituto de Historia/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
Juan Pro is coordinator of the Spanish research team HISTOPIA, director of the Revista de Estudios Utópicos [Journal of Utopian Studies] and coordinator of the Transatlantic Network for the Study of Utopias. He currently directs the UtopiAtlantica project (Transatlantic Utopias... Read More →
Chair: Ellen Rigsby, St. Mary’s College of California ● Peter Sands, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Plus ça change: Competing Visions of the Alternative in Higher Education ● Darren Webb, University of Sheffield Rethinking Schools: Transformative Hope and Utopian Possibility ● Sheri Dorn-Giarmoleo, ARI A Research Institute Command Capital: “How did we get stuck,” A Contributing Consideration to the Colonization of our Imagination and Amnesia of Play
Professor of Communication, St. Mary’s College of California
Ellen M. Rigsby received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric in 2001 at UC Berkeley, after earning a B.A. in Political Philosophy from Johns Hopkins in 1991. She is a Professor in Communication at Saint Mary's College of California. Her areas of teaching are at the intersection of theories of the... Read More →
Chair: Kenneth Roemer, University of Texas at Arlington
Richard Simpson, University of Maine, Presque Isle The Production of Space as a Pedagogical Practice Katherine (Kate) Hilts, Independent Scholar Resort, Utopia, Dystopia: Neocolonialism in Caribbean Luxury Travel Jared Rusnak, University of Pennsylvania From Complacency to Emplacement: Pursuing Utopic Places Through the Flesh Katherine Hampsten, St. Mary's University Tracing Utopia: Insights from the Works and Locales of William Morris & C. R. Ashbee
Chair: Brian Greenspan, Carleton University ● Chiara Xausa, University of Bologna Eco-trauma and Social Dreaming: The Entanglement of Positive and Negative Emotions in Young Adult Anglophone Dystopian Fiction ● Elisabetta Di Minico, Universidad Complutense de Madrid Eat the Poor: The Cannibalistic System of Capitalism and Patriarchy in Bazterrica's "Cadáver Exquisito" ● Amy Taylor, University of Auckland, New Zealand “But Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?” Ecocriticism and Queer Futurity in Dystopian Televisual Narrative: Children’s Violence as Utopian Ambivalence in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Chair: Gretchen Murphy, University of Texas at Austin Ashley Moser, University of Konstanz Atelotopia: Kim Stanley Robinson and Flawed Futures Worth Fighting For Iria Gómez del Castillo Dávila, Instituto de Historia/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas “A Kind of Queer Doing”: Exploring Postutopianism Through the Chicanx Borderlands Julian Rome, University of Michigan Trans Utopian Temporality
Dora Alcocer Walbey, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos Utopian Practices of Dwell by Walking K. Allison Hammer, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Exuberant Embodiment: A Trans Utopia for an Unbearable Present Ian McIntosh, Indiana University, Indianapolis The Very First Pilgrimage, An Inspired Trajectory Out of Africa to Australia
Václav Zheng, he/his/him, Johns Hopkins University When did Utopianism and Historical Thinking Meet? Tracy Rutler, Penn State University Of Brains and Bodies: Enlightenment Medical Utopias Juan Pro, EEHA/IH, CSIC, Seville New Worlds for Fourierist Utopia: The Spanish-Mexican Connection / Nuevos mundos para la utopía fourierista: la conexión hispano-mexicana”
Juan Pro is coordinator of the Spanish research team HISTOPIA, director of the Revista de Estudios Utópicos [Journal of Utopian Studies] and coordinator of the Transatlantic Network for the Study of Utopias. He currently directs the UtopiAtlantica project (Transatlantic Utopias... Read More →
Friday October 18, 2024 8:30am - 10:00am EDT
Tulum C
Chair: Daniel Conway, Texas A&M University Francisco Pizarro Obaid, Universidad Diego Portales La Ciudad de los Césares: la utopía en las versiones literarias chilenas de Manuel Rojas, Luis Enrique Délano y Hugo Silva Christopher Irving, Beacon College The Elsewhere and Elsewhen of Le Guin's “Hainish Cycle” Csaba Toth, Carlow University B. Traven, Chiapas, and Utopian Longing
Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Texas A&M University
My current research involves the use of films in the genre of science fiction to account for the factors that contribute to the normalization of genocide.People should talk to me about philosophy, politics, film, literature, genocide, and the global importance of the Fulbright mission... Read More →
Chair: Ashley Moser, University of Konstanz Kyle Rubini, Toronto Metropolitan University Rewriting the Utopian Gaybourhood Gretchen Murphy, University of Texas at Austin Charlie Jane Anders and the Queer Trans Postapocalyptic Utopia Amrita Chakraborty, Cornell University “Do You Really Want to Know?”: Mapping Queer, Trans, and Femme South Asian Futures and Counter-Histories
Chair: Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers, Library of Congress
Mark Allison, Ohio Wesleyan University Socialism after the 1848 (Non)Event: The Case of The Leader Arun Prakash Raj, Ambedkar University Delhi Articulating Utopia in Print: The Case of Dravida Nadu (1938-1963) John Barberet, Polk State College The “Mundus Inversus” as Critical Utopianism in Erasmus and Fourier
Donald Zarate, University of California at Riverside Here and Now: Black Perspectives on Antituopianism Claire Corbeaux, University of Rochester Decolonizing Utopia in Toni Morrison's Paradise andre carrington, University of California, Riverside Reveries of the Black Fantastic L. Lamar Wilson, Florida State University "The Autonomy of My Black Mind"/"Take Me Back, Burden Hill": Hybrid Essay & Poetic Response to James Baldwin's "Letter from a Region in My Mind" and The Evidence of Things Not Seen
PhD Student, University of California at Riverside
Donald Zárate is a second-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), specializing in Political Theory. His research centers on utopianism and social dreaming, examining how these ideas shape societal structures and individual aspirations... Read More →
Daniel Nunes, University of Ottawa Reading Engels’ Critique of Utopian Socialism Through the Lens of Miguel Abensour Matthew Hodgetts, Case Western Reserve University Fear and the “Uncritical” Utopias of the Alt-Right New Media Olivia Conway, Duke University The (Dystopian) Future is Female: Radical Optimism and Apocalyptic Literature
Daniel Nunes has recently started his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on utopian literature as a mode of political philosophy.
Francisco José Martínez Mesa, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, ¿El utopismo colonizado? El fin del futuro en un mundo acelerado
Guillem Compte Nunes, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), El futuro tecnológico según un colectivo hacktivista de la Ciudad de México: entre la utopía sociotecnológica y la desafección utópica
Araceli Mondragón, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Tiempo y alteridad en la cosmovisión del Mexico indígena
Francia Aguilar Salazar, Independent Scholar, Ghost in the Shell y El Dualismo de la Realidad: Technologia y Virtualidad
“Otherworldly Archives: Disability and the Paranormal in the Mexican Fin de Siècle” Susan Antebi is Professor of Latin American literature in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Her research and writing focus on disability and corporeality, especially in the contexts of contemporary and twentieth-century Mexican cultural production. She is the author of Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production (U of Michigan Press, 2021), which was awarded the 2021 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities and the 2022 LASA Mexico Section Prize for the Best Book in the Humanities. She is also the author of Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability (Palgrave-Macmillan 2009). Her co-edited volumes include The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect, with David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (U of Michigan Press, 2019). Her work has been funded by a Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant and a Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship. Her current research projects center on eugenic legacies in contemporary Mexico and the Americas, and on para-abnormal agency in literature and spectacle.
In her keynote, Dr. Antebi explores the unique function of archival documents or literary texts, which appear to offer themselves to the reader as objects, the embodiment of another world, or as a conduit to that world, one that is out of reach or possibly non-existent. In the moment of archival encounter, bodies and texts affect one another, inscribe each other with meaning, and emerge in relation to multiple objects and worlds within and beyond their immediate horizons. Immersion in this archive is sometimes akin to an otherworldly experience, one that might be cultivated by detailed attention to sensations in the body, to other objects in the room, to the feel and smell of the page, even at the risk of an appropriative, improper reading, or of escapism.
The archive in question assembles textual objects of fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Mexico, in which interest in the occult or paranormal frequently crosses paths with the pathologization of difference, as in the medical diagnosis, treatment, or punishment of hysteria and other conditions. I situate these documents at the nexus of what might be termed the “abnormal” and the “paranormal,” or madness and magic. A reading attuned to both the stigmatization of difference and the creative possibilities afforded by unconventional perceptions of the world allows us to conceive of a hopeful, desired otherwordliness—elsewhere and elsewhen—that is still always anchored in a unique materiality.
Chair: Andrew Bridges, California State University, Fullerton
Christian Haines, Penn State University Terraforming Spiders and Talking Cows: Planetary Utopianism in Adrian Tchaikovsky and Annalee Newitz Andrew Bridges, California State University, Fullerton Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow & The End of HIstory: Mediating Ideas of Utopia Peter Sands, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee The World Gives Way: Persistent Hope; Certain Death Daniel Conway, Texas A&M University Death, Inc.: Utopia for the Rest of Us
Chair: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Penn State University Thomas Horan, The Citadel Hope and Empathy in Alistair McDowall’s Pomona Kenneth Roemer, University of Texas at Arlington Meet the “More Immediate and Intense” Ursula K. Le Guin: Celebrating the First Comprehensive Collection of Her Poetry Diana Palardy, Independent Scholar Strange Bedfellows: Green Bank as a Utopian Enclave for Bank-to-the-Landers, Electrosensitives, and Neo-Nazis Kako Koshino, Mejiro University Precarious Whiteness in Japan’s English Teaching Industry
Assistant Professor of English, Texas A&M University, Kingsville
Dr. Stephanie Peebles Tavera is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, Kingsville. She is the author of (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). She is also the author of the critical... Read More →
Saturday October 19, 2024 10:15am - 11:45am EDT
Tulum A
Chair: Tracy Rutler, Penn State University Ellen Rigsby, Saint Mary's College of California Panarchy as a Political Form of Collective Consciousness Darren Dillman, New Mexico Junior College The Role of Memory in Dystopian Fiction Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Penn State University “Scaling the Treachery”: Dystopian Incommensurabilities and Narrative Self-Sovereignty in John Lanchaster’s The Wall
Professor of Communication, St. Mary’s College of California
Ellen M. Rigsby received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric in 2001 at UC Berkeley, after earning a B.A. in Political Philosophy from Johns Hopkins in 1991. She is a Professor in Communication at Saint Mary's College of California. Her areas of teaching are at the intersection of theories of the... Read More →
Chair: Jared Rusnak, University of Pennsylvania Elise Poll, Arizona State University Fleeing and Finding: Exploring Hostile and Hospitable Places in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower Adam J. Goldsmith, Northwestern University Hope in-against-beyond the Gutter: Towards a Notion of Utopian Strategy Hailey Gilles, Temple University Law That Holds the Line: Preserving the Potential for Utopia in Our Legal Precedent Jordan Huston, Loyola University Now and Always: A Utopian Retort to Political Pessimism
Chair: Matthew Hodgetts, Case Western Reserve University John Michael, University of Rochester Decolonizing Utopia: Exploring Desire and the Dream of Violence in Frantz Fanon Patricia Ventura, Spelman College, and Edward Chan, Waseda University New Black Horror and Racial Dystopia Jeffrey Tucker, University of Rochester Characterization and the Critical Utopia: Gabriel Bump's The New Natural
Chair: andre carrington, University of California, Riverside Tulum B [Has A/V] Phil Wegner, University of Florida Hobbled and Handicapped Before the Race Even Began: Allegory and Hope in Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys Susan Hegeman, University of Florida Gatekeeping and the Fascist End of the Public Sphere in Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill Patricia Ventura, Spelman College The American Anti-Fascism
