Keynote Speakers
Andrew van der Vlies is a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. Formerly lecturer at University of Sheffield, his first book, South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over,
published by Manchester University Press in 2007 (paperback 2011), considers
the construction of the idea of an anglophone ‘South African’ literature
through case studies of the publication and reception histories of authors from
Olive Schreiner, Alan Paton, and Alex La Guma to J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda. The
Journal of
Southern African Studies described the work as 'a significant
addition to the field of postcolonial studies... informative and enabling', 'a
model of scholarly rigour [that] will, one hopes, beget similar projects in
other postcolonial contexts' (35.2 [June 2009], 525-26). Andrew's edited reader of scholarship on South African print cultures in was published by Wits University Press in 2012, and his short book on
Coetzee's novel Disgrace
was published by Continuum in 2010. Recent work includes contributions
to the Cambridge
History of South African Literature, Oxford History of the Novel in
English, and an MLA essay collection on Coetzee. He has published on queer politics and performance in contemporary South African art
and on the idea of the archive in post-apartheid literature. In 2013-14 he will
be on Leverhulme Trust-funded leave to write a book about disappointment in
contemporary South African literature and culture. Andrew is Associate Editor for the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010) project, co-editor of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, a Routledge journal, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern African Studies and Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa. He guest co-edited (with Patrick Denman Flanery) an issue of Scrutiny2 on ‘South African Cultural Texts and the Global Mediascape’ in 2008, and (with Kai Easton) a special double issue of Safundi on cosmopolitanism and the Cape in the work of Zoë Wicomb in 2011. Andrew is a regular reviewer of African and South African material for the Times Literary Supplement, where he has published on Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and J.M. Coetzee, amongst many others. He has also published in the leading South African fine arts journal Art South Africa and in the British Independent newspaper, and appeared on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Open Book’.
Paul K. Saint-Amour is Associate Professor of English. He works on Victorian and modernist literature, with special interests in the novel, law, trauma, and visual culture studies. After receiving his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Stanford, he taught at Pomona College for ten years before joining the Penn faculty. He has been a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Center for the Humanities at Cornell, and the National Humanities Center. Saint-Amour's The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Cornell UP, 2003) won the MLA Prize for a First Book. His articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Diacritics, Modernism/Modernity, Nineteenth-Century Studies, Novel, Post 45, Public Books, Theory, Culture, and Society, and Representations, whose special “Counterfactuals” issue he co-edited with Catherine Gallagher and Mark Maslan. With Robert Spoo and Joseph Jenkins he co-edited a special "Futures of Fair Use" issue of Law and Literature.
A few years ago, Saint-Amour chaired a fact-finding panel initiated by the International James Joyce Foundation (IJJF) to study the permissions history and criteria of the Estate of James Joyce and the general problem of scholarly fair use. The panel produced a detailed FAQ, "James Joyce: Copyright, Fair Use, and Permissions." Saint-Amour is now a Trustee of the IJJF and sits on the editorial board of the open-access journal Authorship. From 2012-13 he served as President of the Modernist Studies Association, whose fair use task force he co-chairs with Robert Spoo.Saint-Amour co-edits, with Jessica Berman, the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia UP. He edited the volume Modernism and Copyright (2011) for Oxford UP's Modernist Literature and Culture series and is currently completing a book-length project entitled Archive, Bomb, Civilian: Modernism in the Shadow of Total War.
In Summer 2012, Professor Saint-Amour co-directed, with Professor Kevin Dettmar of Pomona College, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers, "James Joyce's Ulysses: Text and Contexts," at Trinity College, Dublin. In March 2013 he helped organize a Disability & Modernism conference at Penn.
A few years ago, Saint-Amour chaired a fact-finding panel initiated by the International James Joyce Foundation (IJJF) to study the permissions history and criteria of the Estate of James Joyce and the general problem of scholarly fair use. The panel produced a detailed FAQ, "James Joyce: Copyright, Fair Use, and Permissions." Saint-Amour is now a Trustee of the IJJF and sits on the editorial board of the open-access journal Authorship. From 2012-13 he served as President of the Modernist Studies Association, whose fair use task force he co-chairs with Robert Spoo.Saint-Amour co-edits, with Jessica Berman, the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia UP. He edited the volume Modernism and Copyright (2011) for Oxford UP's Modernist Literature and Culture series and is currently completing a book-length project entitled Archive, Bomb, Civilian: Modernism in the Shadow of Total War.
In Summer 2012, Professor Saint-Amour co-directed, with Professor Kevin Dettmar of Pomona College, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers, "James Joyce's Ulysses: Text and Contexts," at Trinity College, Dublin. In March 2013 he helped organize a Disability & Modernism conference at Penn.
Keynotes Addresses
Novelist
Patrick Flanery was born in California and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning his BFA in Film from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Flanery went on to work for three years in the film industry before moving to the UK, where he completed a doctoral degree in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has written for the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Times Literary Supplement. Flanery's acclaimed first novel, Absolution, published in 2012, shines a light on contemporary South Africa and the long dark shadow of the recent past, while taking on the elusive nature of truth and self-perception and the mysterious alchemy of the creative process. Flanery's second novel, Fallen Land (2013), resembling what DeLillo calls "the American mystery," is a chilling tale of madness, and a gripping portrayal of a land and people caught in the gears of the American machine.
Panel Organizers
Magali Armillas-Tiseyra (University of Mississippi) - Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University, where she specialized in Latin American and African literatures. She is currently working on a book analyzing novels about dictators, in both Latin America and Africa. Research interests include: theories of aesthetics and politics, genre and narrative theory as well as theories of orality and literacy, postcolonial studies, and discussions of World, comparative, and transnational approaches to literature. Dr. Armillas teaches courses on World Literature, postcolonial studies, and genre (including: magical realism, the short story).
Lily Saint (Wesleyan) - Lily Saint holds a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and a B.A. in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan, where her research explores the nexus between ethics and cultural practice in the Global South. She is currently writing a book, Acts of Culture: Ethics and Genre in South Africa which investigates black practices of reading and spectatorship in twentieth century South Africa to explore how such “acts of culture” contributed to the formation of ethical relation during a period characterized by ethical crisis. Professor Saint’s writing has been published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, Safundi, Social Dynamics, and Critical Quarterly, in the collection, Print, Text & Book Cultures in South Africa (2012), and she is a contributor to the blog Africa is a Country. Professor Saint teaches classes on Global and Postcolonial literature and theory, Anglophone African novels, diasporic literature, and ethical theory.
Jennifer Spitzer (Ithaca College) - Jennifer Spitzer is Assistant Professor of English at Ithaca college, where she specializes in late nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature and culture. Her research and teaching focus on transatlantic modernism, psychoanalysis, literature and psychology, and gender and sexuality. Jennifer has taught at New York University (where she completed her Ph.D. in 2012), The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and Harvard University (where she was a Lecturer of History and Literature). She has published on Oscar Wilde in Oscholars and has an article on D.H. Lawrence forthcoming in Modernism/modernity (January 2014). Her research explores the discursive rivalries between modernism and psychoanalysis during the first half of the twentieth century in Britain. Drawing on the theory and practice of Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and W.H. Auden, her current book project reconstructs debates between these authors and critics, and their psychoanalyst counterparts, with an eye to how such debates contributed to the formation of English modernism.
Ania Spyra (Butler) - Ania Spyra is Assistant Professor of English at Butler University, where she specializes in Transnational and Postcolonial Literatures and Theory, World Literature, Comparative Literature, and Travel Writing. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and an M.A. from University of Silesia, Poland.
Gayle Rogers (University of Pittsburgh) - Gayle Rogers is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he works mainly on global modernisms, literary history, translation theory, comparative literature, and periodicals. His book Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (Oxford UP, 2012) reconstructs an expansive archive of translations, reviews, correspondence, and commentaries among Anglo-American, Irish, Spanish, and Latin American writers between World Wars. The book analyzes cooperative efforts to renovate the post-Great War idea of “Europe” by allying its rebirth with the imagined reemergence of a European Spain. His new book project, Between Literary Histories: Translation, Bilingualism, and Modernist World Literature, situates American and Spanish modernisms within a history of literatures that have emerged from Anglophone/Hispanophone language contact, from the birth of modern Spanish literary studies in the 1910s to the “translation” of Don Quixote into Spanglish in 2002. He sits on the board of the Modernist Studies Association, has served as book review editor for Critical Quarterly, and is affiliated with the European Studies Center, the Global Studies Center, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Cultural Studies Program.
Aarthi Vadde (Duke) - Aarthi Vadde is Assistant Professor in English and International Comparative Studies at Duke University, where she works on British and Anglophone literature with a particular interest in the novel, transnational modernism, postcolonialism, and contemporary issues of migration and globalization. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her current book project "Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism from the Late Colonial to Contemporary Era" looks at the conjuncture of modernist aesthetics and internationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. There it recovers a set of formal strategies and political aspirations that remain crucial for writers adapting the novel to the contemporary moment of globalization. Tracing convergences between formal experimentation and global thought in works that circulate across Britain, South Asia, South Africa, and the Caribbean, this study diversifies the practices and practitioners usually associated with modernism’s evolution and its legacies. Vadde joins Duke from a postdoctoral fellowship in the English Department at Harvard and serves as book reviews editor (British and Anglophone literature division) for the journal Contemporary Literature.
Invited Papers
Chris Bush (Northwestern)
Harris Feinsod (Northwestern)
Lori Cole (Brandeis University)
Thomas Davis (Ohio State University)
Anne Garland-Mahler (U Arizona)
Nico Israel (CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College)
Lanie Millar (U Oregon)
Josh Miller (Michigan)
Nicole Rizzuto (Georgetown)
Lily Sheehan (Oregon State University)
Tim Wientzen (Harvard)
Harris Feinsod (Northwestern)
Lori Cole (Brandeis University)
Thomas Davis (Ohio State University)
Anne Garland-Mahler (U Arizona)
Nico Israel (CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College)
Lanie Millar (U Oregon)
Josh Miller (Michigan)
Nicole Rizzuto (Georgetown)
Lily Sheehan (Oregon State University)
Tim Wientzen (Harvard)