Conference: Humanities and Social Sceinces / Conferencia Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales

The Center for Comparative Literature and Society of Columbia University
is pleased to announce its second graduate student conference
“Figures of Comparison in the Humanities and the Social Sciences”

Friday, March 2nd
Maison Française, Buell Hall, East Gallery

8:30am: Registration and breakfast
9:00am: Introduction: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Keynote Address:
Eduardo Cadava, “Marx before literature” (Princeton University)

Economies of translation/ transfiguration/… (11:00am-12:30pm)
Moderator: Elizabeth Povinelli
Erin Trapp, “The mistaken translation in The False Sun Recordings” (University of California, Irvine)
Paul Benzon, “From translation to Transmission: digital information, global circulation, and the viral image” (Rutgers University)
Polina Dimova, “Decadent senses: the dissemination of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé across the arts” (University of California, Berkeley)

Sites and sounds of comparison (2:00-3:30pm)
Moderator: Susan Boynton
Brían Hanrahan, “‘Film, sound, and music in Béla Balázs’s Der Geist des Films (1930)” (Columbia University)
Ljubica Ilic, “Mirrors and echoes: beyond the confines of the theatrical space” (University of California, Los Angeles)
Emily Wilbourne, “Resounding texts: musical metaphor and affect” (New York University)

Enemies, strangers, neighbors, friends (4:00-5:30pm)
Moderator: Jason Smith
Nasser Mufti, “Stásis and partition – the condition of anxiety” (University of California, Irvine)
Jennifer Coleman, “Theory and praxis in the evolution of secular nationalism in contemporary India: the case of conversion” (University of Pennsylvania)
David Sayer, “Between Realpolitik and utopianism: Levinas’ theory of justice” (York University)

6:00pm: Reception
Heyman Center for the Humanities, Common Room

7:00pm: “Poetry in Comparison,” a poetry reading with Mark Strand, former Poet
Laureate of the United States, Pulitzer Prize Winner (Blizzard of One,
1998), and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University

Saturday, March 3rd
Maison Française, Buell Hall, East Gallery

8:30am: Breakfast

Figures of the in-between (9:00-10:30am)
Moderator: Stathis Gourgouris
Kairos Llobrera, “Between slavery and freedom: the fugitive slave” (Columbia University)
Ameer Sohrawardy, “Janissary culture in 17th century English literature” (Rutgers University)
Jan Hein Hoogstad, “Downbeat: medial recognition in a rhythmic battlefield” (University of Amsterdam)

Figures of intellectual labor (11:00am-12:30pm)
Moderator: Bruce Robbins
Eric Owens, “Remember Internationalism?” (Duke University)
Alysia Garrison, “Translator, spy, world humanitarian: Beckett’s comparative imagination and transfigurative politics” (University of California, Davis)
Maria Boletsi, “From barbarian presences to barbarian acts: barbarism as a comparative function in J.M. Coetzee’s and Kendell Geers’ Waiting for the Barbarians” (Leiden University)

Unthinking generations: kinship and comparison (2:00-3:30pm)
Moderator: Marianne Hirsch
David Youssef, “Latency and the transmission of universality: the literature of the secret agent” (University of California, Los Angeles)
Mathilde Labbé and Christelle Palpacuer, “Nord Perdu by Nancy Huston: from cultural literacy to literary culture” (École Normale Supérieure and Rutgers University)

Faculty roundtable (4:00-6:00pm)
6:30pm: Buffet reception
Heyman Center for the Humanities, Common Room