4th ARG/VRG Annual Colloquium
Friday, April 22, 2011
and Saturday, April 23, 2011

Friday April 22, 4:30pm.
Goldwin Smith Hall, G22

Daniel Hack
The Citational Souls of Black Folk

Saturday April 23
English Department Lounge
Goldwin Smith Hall, 9:30am-5pm

9:30: Morning Coffee

10:00-11:30: Really?

Adam Grener – Pride and Prejudice and Probability
Will Cordeiro – Having It Both Ways: Queerness and Quixoticism in Austen’s Northanger Abbey.
Kamila Janiszewska – Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Azarian: An Episode, or, How to Write a Novel that Will Infuriate Henry James
Matthew Fellion – Narrative Folly in Chaucer, Thackery, T.S. Eliot

11:30-11:45: Coffee Break

11:45-1:00: Exceptions: Politics, Performances, Places

Nolan Bennett – The Autobiography of B(e) Franklin: Benjamin Franklin as Citizen and Printer
Ali Wright – 19th-Century Conversations: Mental Illness and Its Connection to the African-American Community
Alex Black – “A Panic of Sympathy”: Spectating Slave Auctions in Antebellum New York

1:00-2:00:  Lunch

2:00-3:30:  Space Oddities

Melissa Gniadek – The Traveling Text or, Off-Shore Reading
Jonathan Senchyne – Mark Twain, Millard Fillmore, and the Scale of American Literary Studies
Brigitte Fielder – Animal Humanism: Abolitionist Sentiment and the Animal
Michael Jonik – “Melville’s Passive Subjects; or, a Pile of Stones.”
Jill Spivey – “With Desecrating Tread”: Puritan/Indian Burial Gounds and the Nineteenth-Century Poetic Imagination

3:30-3:45 Coffee Break

3:45-5:00: Seminal Traces

Brant Torres – Reading Without a Condom: Queer Desire and Nineteenth-Century Occult Epistemologies
Jane Kim – Fathers in Percy Shelley’s The Cenci
Xine Yao – Homo/Social: Phrenology, Sperm(aceti), and Sexuality in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick

CFP

We invite graduate students from all departments at Cornell to share their work on the nineteenth century. You need not submit your most polished work. We are looking for suggestive papers that will invite further exchange and for a day of friendly discussion among colleagues. The colloquium will also involve a keynote address by Daniel Hack of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on Friday, April 22nd.

A bit about the spirit of the day: The first “Nineteenth-Century Day” was organized in the spring of 2008 to bring graduate students who love the (long) nineteenth-century as much as we do together across disciplines to share their work in a friendly environment. Over the past three years students with different areas of specialization and at different points in their graduate careers have participated. Some have taken the opportunity to present their first conference papers, while others have presented works-in-progress. The day brings together colleagues who don’t often have a chance to hear one another’s work or to think about connections between their work. We hope to continue such productive, congenial conversations this year!

Abstracts of no more than 300 words are due to Brigitte Fielder (bnf7@cornell.edu) by Tuesday, March 2nd.  Papers, when presented, should be ten to fifteen minutes in length.

This event is made possible through the generous support of the Department of English, the History of Art Department, the Society for the Humanities, Africana Studies Research Center, the Graduate School, the Flora Rose House, and the GPSAFC. It is open to the Cornell community and the public.