University College London (UCL)
Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies
in collaboration with the
Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry
Humanity and Animality in 20th and 21st Century Culture:
Narratives, Theories, Histories. An Interdisciplinary Conference
15th-16th September, 2014
Monday 15th September:
9.00
Registration (Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre)
9.30
Welcome (Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre)
9.45- 12.00
Round table 1: Animals, Ecologies, Apocalypse
(Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre)
Prof. Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge University, Italian) in collaboration with Dr. Damiano Benvegnù (University of Virginia): Primo Levi’s Animals
Dr. Martin Crowley (Cambridge University, French): How many ecologies? How many worlds?
Dr. Florian Mussgnug (UCL, Italian/Comparative Literature): Animal Apocalypse
Chair: Dr. Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge University, Italian)
12.00-13.30
Panel 1 A: H&A in Comparative Literature
(Malet Place Eng 1.02 Lecture Theatre)
Natalie Woodward (Royal Holloway, English): Talking about “the Horrors”: Articulating Creatureliness in Holocaust Literature
Dr. Julia Hoydis (University of Cologne, English): Alien Creatures Between Folklore and Technology: Humanity in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber
Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa (UCL, Comparative Literature): A Radio in the Sand, or: Depictions of Human Animality in Driss Chraibi’s French-Moroccan Detective Story L’enquete au pays (1981) and Abe Kobo’s Absurd Japanese Novel Suna no onna 砂の女 /The Woman in the Dunes (1961)
Chair: Dr. Jessica George (Cardiff University, English)
Panel 1 B: H&A in Literature and Culture
(Malet Place Eng 1.03 Lecture Theatre)
Dr. Eugenio Bolongaro (McGill University, Italian): The Claim of Life in Italo Calvino’s La giornata d’uno scrutatore: Imagining Post-Humanist Relationality
Dr. Vilma De Gasperin (Oxford University, Italian): The Thorn in the Lion’s Paw: The Wounded Creature in Anna Maria Ortese
Dr. Vassiliki Petsa (University of Peloponnese, Political Science and International Relations): Beyond Sovereign Politics: Aspects of ‘Creaturely Life’ as Strategies of Resistance and Vehicles of Utopian Prospects in Greek and Italian Literature
Chair: Dr. Federica Mazzara (UCL, Italian/BASc)
13.30-14.30
Break
14.30-16.00
Panel 2 A: Postcolonial Animalities in Art, Graphic Novels and Films
(Malet Place Eng 1.02 Lecture Theatre)
Dr. Matthew Whittle (University of Manchester): Lost trophies: Hunting animals and anti-colonial resistance in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa and Walton Ford’s Pancha Tantra
Dr. Jade Munslow Ong (University of Salford, Nineteenth-Century Literature): “I’m only a dog!”: The Rwandan Genocide, Dehumanisation and the Graphic Novel
Dr. Veronica Barnsley (University of Salford): Childhood and Animality in Ben Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild
Chair: Dr. Jean-Paul Martinon (Goldsmiths College, Visual Cultures)
Panel 2 B: H&A in Contemporary Thought
(Malet Place Eng 1.03 Lecture Theatre)
Lucia Zaietta (University of Turin, Philosophy): We are not only among Human Beings: Rethinking Animality throughout Merleau-Ponty
Michael Lyons (Trinity College Dublin, Philosophy): Korsgaard and Kantian Duties to Animals
Giovanni Menegalle (Cambridge University, French): Derrida and the Limits of the Human: Between Phenomenology and a General Ontology of the Living
Chair: Prof. Mairéad Hanrahan (UCL, French)
16.00-16.30
Break
16.30-18.00
Panel 3 A: H&A in Art, Film, and Critical Theory
(Malet Place Eng 1.02 Lecture Theatre)
Dr. Barbara Rauch (OCAD University, Art, Media & Design): Synthetic Emotions of Hybrids
Maria Giménez Cavallo (Columbia University, Film Studies): For a Pythagorean, Posthumanist, Transcendental Cinema: an Analysis of Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le quattro volte
Rodolfo Piskorski (Cardiff University, Critical and Cultural Theory): Performing (and Becoming) the Animal From the 19th to the 21st Century
Chair: Dr. Stephanie Eichberg (UCL, History of Medicine/Science and Technology Studies)
Panel 3 B: H&A between Antiquity and Modernity
(Malet Place Eng 1.03 Lecture Theatre)
Francesca Spiegel (Hellenic Studies, University of Berlin): Bestialization and Otherness in Greek Tragedy
Alice Hazard (King’s College, French): Levinasian Inter-Species Encounters: a Medieval Case-Study
Dr. Georgios Tsagdis (Kingston University, Philosophy): Taming the Therion: from Plato to Agamben
Chair: Dr. Jane Gilbert (UCL, French)
18.15-19.15
Keynote Lecture
(Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre)
Dr. Anat Pick (Queen Mary, Film Studies): Criminal Animals: From War Machine to Vegan Cinema
Chair: Dr. Florian Mussgnug (UCL, Italian/Comparative Literature)
Tuesday 16th September:
9.00
Registration (Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre)
9.15-11.30
Round table 2: Languages of Confinement and of Inclusion
(Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre)
Dr. Gavin Weston (Goldsmiths College, Anthropology): “Human zoos”, Human Rights & Relative Humanity: Ethnological Expositions Between the 19th and 21st Century
Prof. Guy Cook (King’s College, Language in Education): ‘I am a daughter myself’: exploring the language of the human animal boundary
Dr. Daniel Abondolo (UCL, SSEES): Why is a Squirrel’s Tail in the Back?
Chair: Dr. Stephanie Bird (UCL, German)
11.40-13:30
Panel 4 A: H&A in Anthropology, Post-Colonial Studies, and Evolutionary Theory
(Malet Place Eng 1.02 Lecture Theatre)
Daniel West (Oxford University, Geography and the Environment): Stig of the Lab: The Science, Ethics and Politics of Neanderthal Representation
Kathleen Bryson (UCL, Evolutionary Anthropology): Ambiguity and Evolutionary Theory: Towards a New Gradualist Paradigm?
Charis Bredin (SOAS, Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies): Divine Signs and Desert Worlds: Animals in the Libyan Literary Imaginary
Dr. Francesca Zunino (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia/King’s College, Department of Linguistic and Cultural Studies): An Integrated Human-Animal-Spiritual Identity: Past and Present Mexican Narratives
Chair: (tbc)
Panel 4 B: H&A in Contemporary Literature and Critical Theory
(Malet Place Eng 1.03 Lecture Theatre)
Thea Petrou (UCL, French): Jacques Roubaud’s Talking Animals
Stefano Rossoni (UCL, Comparative Literature): Readings of Kafka’s Report to an Academy in the Narrative of Philip Roth and J. M. Coetzee
Ti-Han Chang (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, Institut d’Etudes Transculturelles et Transtextuelles): From Poetic Language and the Sympathetic Imagination to the “Voices” of the Animal Other: An Analysis of the Postcolonial Eco-literatures of J.M. Coetzee and Wu Ming-yi
Alex Marshall (University of Oxford, German): Jackals, Arabs, and Diaspora: Talking Animals, Zionism and Othered Minds in a Kafka’s Short Story
Chair: Prof. Timothy Mathews (UCL, French)
13.30-14.30
Break
14.30-16.15
Panel 5 A: H&A in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Drama
(Malet Place Eng 1.02 Lecture Theatre)
Dr. Vladimir Alexander Smith-Mesa (UCL, SSEES): Towards Harmony: Animality, Cuban Arts and the Aesthetics of the Revolution
Janhavi Mittal (King’s College, English): ‘Cripplewood is not dead wood’: Patchwork Boundaries and Posthuman Ethics
Alexandra Paddock (University of Oxford, English): “What colour is Nugget?” Seeing Animals in Twentieth and Twenty-first-century Drama
Polly Gould (UCL, Bartlett School of Architecture): No More Elsewhere: Antarctica Through the Archive of the Edward Wilson (1872-1912) Watercolours
Chair: (tbc)
Panel 5 B: H&A in Philosophy, Law, and Political Thought
(Malet Place Eng 1.03 Lecture Theatre)
Paul Raekstad (University of Cambridge, Philosophy): Human Nature as Freedom: Karl Marx on Consciousness, Humanity, and Animality
Dr. Matthew Wraith (Imperial College, Literature and Humanities): ‘Creatures that Swarm and Multiply in a Drop of Water’ – Animal Collectives and Mass Politics in Early Twentieth Century Thought and Culture
Catia Faria and Dr. Eze Paez (Pompeu Fabra University, Law): Humanity and Domesticity: Two Versions of the Same Prejudice
Rosa María De la Torre Torres & Prof. Aldo Ulises Olmedo Castillo (Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Constitutional Law and General Coordinator of the Research group Animal Law (GIDA); Faculty of Law and Social Sciences): Legal and Ethical Reclassification of Non-human Animals in Mexican Law
Chair: Dr. Hugh Goodacre (UCL, Economics)
Panel 5 C: H&A in Contemporary Literature and Culture
(Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre)
Seán McCorry (University of Sheffield, English): Literacy, Bêtise and the Production of Species Difference in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
Antonia Peroikou (University of Cyprus, English): ‘Only not for us’: Writing Across the Species Boundary in Kafka and Benjamin
Dr. Jessica George (Cardiff University, English): ‘The speeches all theirs and never yours’: Language, identity, and animal transformation in Gwyneth Lewis’s The Meat Tree
Chair: Dr. Stephanie Eichberg (UCL, History of Medicine/Science and Technology Studies)
16.15-16.45
Break
16.45-18.45
Round table 3: Human-Animal Relations in Philosophy and Critical Theory
(Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre)
Dr. Kevin Inston (UCL, French): The Human-Animal Relation in the Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dr. Ian James (Cambridge University, French): The Non-human Relation
Dr. Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield (University of Colorado, French and Italian): Negative Compassion: Derrida and Post-Human Ethics
Chair: Prof. Timothy Mathews (UCL, French)
19.00
Conclusion (Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre)