2023 Keynote speaker
Claire Donato is the author of the forthcoming fiction book Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions) and the forthcoming poetry chapbook Woebegone (Theaphora Editions). Her past books include Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press), a fiction novella, and The Second Body (Poor Claudia), a full-length collection of poems.
Claire's work has been included in numerous anthologies, and recent writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Chicago Review, Forever, BOMB, The Elephants, DIAGRAM, and GoldFlakePaint. She also contributed an introduction to The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer. In addition to writing books, Claire makes music, illustrates, and has a 35mm photography practice. Currently, she works as Assistant Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she received the 2020-2021 Distinguished Teacher Award. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her cat, Woebegone.
Learn more about Claire on her website: https://www.somanytumbleweeds.com/
2016 Keynote Speakers
Patrick Deer
Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University, where he focuses on war culture and war literature, modernism, and contemporary British and American literature and culture, and Anglophone literature and human rights.
He is currently working on two book projects about twentieth and twenty-first century transatlantic literature and culture: Deep England: Forging British Culture After Empire, focuses on the second half of the twentieth century and explores tropes of violence, consumption, secrecy, dissent and nostalgia in a national literature and culture that he argues has actively resisted decline and decolonization between 1945 and 1979. Surge and Silence: Understanding America’s Cultures of War, explores contemporary US and British war culture since 1989 and focuses in particular on literature, film and media from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Patrick Deer is also co-organizer of NYU’s Cultures of War and the Post-war research collaborative.
Elisa Albert
Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth (2015), The Book of Dahlia (2008), How This Night is Different (2006), and the editor of the anthology Freud’s Blind Spot (2010).
Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, The New York Times, Post Road, The Guardian, Gulf Coast, Commentary, Salon, Tablet, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, The Rumpus, Time Magazine, on NPR, and in many anthologies.
Albert grew up in Los Angeles and received her MFA from Columbia University. A recipient of the Moment magazine emerging writer award and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she has received residencies and fellowships from The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Djerassi, Vermont Studio Center, and The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Holland. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia's School of the Arts and was recently Visiting Writer at The College of Saint Rose.
She lives in upstate New York with her family.
(From her website: http://www.elisaalbert.com/)
2015 Keynote Speakers
Ulrich Baer
Dr. Baer received his B.A. from Harvard in 1991, and his Ph.D. from Yale in Comparative Literature in 1995, and first joined NYU as assistant professor in NYU's Department of German in 1996. A widely published author, editor, and translator, he is an expert on modern poetry, literary theory, and photography, and has published extensively on poetry, photography, and issues in contemporary art and culture. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award (twice), a Getty Research Fellowship, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. Among his books are The Rilke Alphabet, Beggar's Chicken: Stories from Shanghai, Hannah Arendt zwischen den Disziplinen (co-editor), Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters on Life (translator and editor), Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, the anthology 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, and Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan.
Dawn Lundy Martin
Francisco State University and her PhD in literature at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst with a dissertation on experimentalism and subjectivity in contemporary poetry. She is the author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press 2007), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for both Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award; Candy, a limited edition letterpress chapbook (Albion Books 2011); The Main Cause of the Exodus (O’clock Press 2014); and The Morning Hour, selected by C.D. Wright for the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship. Her most recent collection is Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2015).
With Vivien Labaton, she also co-edited The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004), which uses a gender lens to describe and theorize young activist work in the U.S. She is the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation (New York), an organization, which was for 20 years the only young activist feminist foundation in the U.S.
Martin is currently at work, with poet/scholar Erica Hunt, on an anthology of experimental writing by black women in North America and the Caribbean (Kore Press 2015). She has written a libretto for a video installation opera, titled "Good Stock on the Dimension Floor," featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and is collaborating with architect Mitch McEwen on Detroit Opera House, “a project which stages an opera as a house, the house and its dramas of occupancy, vacancy, demolition, and re-purposing as an opera.” Martin is also a co-founder of the Black Took Collective, an experimental performance art/poetry group of three.
Claire Donato is the author of the forthcoming fiction book Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions) and the forthcoming poetry chapbook Woebegone (Theaphora Editions). Her past books include Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press), a fiction novella, and The Second Body (Poor Claudia), a full-length collection of poems.
Claire's work has been included in numerous anthologies, and recent writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Chicago Review, Forever, BOMB, The Elephants, DIAGRAM, and GoldFlakePaint. She also contributed an introduction to The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer. In addition to writing books, Claire makes music, illustrates, and has a 35mm photography practice. Currently, she works as Assistant Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she received the 2020-2021 Distinguished Teacher Award. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her cat, Woebegone.
Learn more about Claire on her website: https://www.somanytumbleweeds.com/
2016 Keynote Speakers
Patrick Deer
Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University, where he focuses on war culture and war literature, modernism, and contemporary British and American literature and culture, and Anglophone literature and human rights.
He is currently working on two book projects about twentieth and twenty-first century transatlantic literature and culture: Deep England: Forging British Culture After Empire, focuses on the second half of the twentieth century and explores tropes of violence, consumption, secrecy, dissent and nostalgia in a national literature and culture that he argues has actively resisted decline and decolonization between 1945 and 1979. Surge and Silence: Understanding America’s Cultures of War, explores contemporary US and British war culture since 1989 and focuses in particular on literature, film and media from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Patrick Deer is also co-organizer of NYU’s Cultures of War and the Post-war research collaborative.
Elisa Albert
Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth (2015), The Book of Dahlia (2008), How This Night is Different (2006), and the editor of the anthology Freud’s Blind Spot (2010).
Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, The New York Times, Post Road, The Guardian, Gulf Coast, Commentary, Salon, Tablet, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, The Rumpus, Time Magazine, on NPR, and in many anthologies.
Albert grew up in Los Angeles and received her MFA from Columbia University. A recipient of the Moment magazine emerging writer award and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she has received residencies and fellowships from The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Djerassi, Vermont Studio Center, and The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Holland. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia's School of the Arts and was recently Visiting Writer at The College of Saint Rose.
She lives in upstate New York with her family.
(From her website: http://www.elisaalbert.com/)
2015 Keynote Speakers
Ulrich Baer
Dr. Baer received his B.A. from Harvard in 1991, and his Ph.D. from Yale in Comparative Literature in 1995, and first joined NYU as assistant professor in NYU's Department of German in 1996. A widely published author, editor, and translator, he is an expert on modern poetry, literary theory, and photography, and has published extensively on poetry, photography, and issues in contemporary art and culture. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award (twice), a Getty Research Fellowship, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. Among his books are The Rilke Alphabet, Beggar's Chicken: Stories from Shanghai, Hannah Arendt zwischen den Disziplinen (co-editor), Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters on Life (translator and editor), Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, the anthology 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, and Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan.
Dawn Lundy Martin
Francisco State University and her PhD in literature at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst with a dissertation on experimentalism and subjectivity in contemporary poetry. She is the author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press 2007), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for both Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award; Candy, a limited edition letterpress chapbook (Albion Books 2011); The Main Cause of the Exodus (O’clock Press 2014); and The Morning Hour, selected by C.D. Wright for the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship. Her most recent collection is Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2015).
With Vivien Labaton, she also co-edited The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004), which uses a gender lens to describe and theorize young activist work in the U.S. She is the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation (New York), an organization, which was for 20 years the only young activist feminist foundation in the U.S.
Martin is currently at work, with poet/scholar Erica Hunt, on an anthology of experimental writing by black women in North America and the Caribbean (Kore Press 2015). She has written a libretto for a video installation opera, titled "Good Stock on the Dimension Floor," featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and is collaborating with architect Mitch McEwen on Detroit Opera House, “a project which stages an opera as a house, the house and its dramas of occupancy, vacancy, demolition, and re-purposing as an opera.” Martin is also a co-founder of the Black Took Collective, an experimental performance art/poetry group of three.
2014 Keynote Speakers
Anna McCarthy
Anna McCarthy (Cinema Studies at NYU) will present her critical keynote address on Friday, 6-7:30 pm. Her work frequently explores complexity within post-World War II American television, examining the connections between television viewership, American politics, and citizenship. Her research interests include material culture, cultural policy, and biopolitics. She is the co-editor of the journal Social Text and the author of such works as Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (2001) and The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (2010).
Myung Mi Kim
Myung Mi Kim (Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo), this year's creative keynote speaker brought to the conference by Barzakh, will present on Saturday, 1-2:30 pm. Her work articulates itself through geographical and linguistic dislocation while writing around the lyric. Her research interests include translingual/transcultural poetics and 20thcentury American poetry and poetics. She is the author of several works, including Under Flag (1991), Commons (2002), and Penury (2009).
Anna McCarthy
Anna McCarthy (Cinema Studies at NYU) will present her critical keynote address on Friday, 6-7:30 pm. Her work frequently explores complexity within post-World War II American television, examining the connections between television viewership, American politics, and citizenship. Her research interests include material culture, cultural policy, and biopolitics. She is the co-editor of the journal Social Text and the author of such works as Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (2001) and The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (2010).
Myung Mi Kim
Myung Mi Kim (Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo), this year's creative keynote speaker brought to the conference by Barzakh, will present on Saturday, 1-2:30 pm. Her work articulates itself through geographical and linguistic dislocation while writing around the lyric. Her research interests include translingual/transcultural poetics and 20thcentury American poetry and poetics. She is the author of several works, including Under Flag (1991), Commons (2002), and Penury (2009).
2013 Keynote Speakers
Jill Magi
Jill Magi, this year's creative keynote speaker brought to you by Barzakh, works in text, image, and textile and is the author of LABOR (forthcoming from Nightboat), SLOT (Ugly Duckling Presse), Cadastral Map (Shearsman),Torchwood (Shearsman), Threads (Futurepoem), the chapbooks Die for love/furlough, Poetry Barn Barn!, Confidence and Autonomy, and numerous handmade books. Jill teaches at Goddard College, Columbia College Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ashley Dawson
Ashley Dawson, Professor at CUNY Graduate Center, will deliver this year's critical keynote lecture. Much of Dr. Dawson’s work hinges on the experience and literature of migration, including movement from postcolonial nations such as Jamaica and Nigeria to the former imperial center and from rural areas to mega-cities of the global South like Lagos and Mumbai. At present Professor Dawson is at work on a book on urban culture and imperialism and on a history of twentieth-century British literature. He is the author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007).
Jill Magi
Jill Magi, this year's creative keynote speaker brought to you by Barzakh, works in text, image, and textile and is the author of LABOR (forthcoming from Nightboat), SLOT (Ugly Duckling Presse), Cadastral Map (Shearsman),Torchwood (Shearsman), Threads (Futurepoem), the chapbooks Die for love/furlough, Poetry Barn Barn!, Confidence and Autonomy, and numerous handmade books. Jill teaches at Goddard College, Columbia College Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ashley Dawson
Ashley Dawson, Professor at CUNY Graduate Center, will deliver this year's critical keynote lecture. Much of Dr. Dawson’s work hinges on the experience and literature of migration, including movement from postcolonial nations such as Jamaica and Nigeria to the former imperial center and from rural areas to mega-cities of the global South like Lagos and Mumbai. At present Professor Dawson is at work on a book on urban culture and imperialism and on a history of twentieth-century British literature. He is the author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007).
2012 Keynote Speaker
Thierry Bardini
Thierry Bardini will present the keynote address for the 10th Annual Graduate Conference, WASTE, hosted by University at Albany's English Graduate Student Organization. Bardini is professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada and Co-Director of the Workshop in Radical Empiricism. His most recent book, Junkware, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011.
From University of Minnesota Press website:
The essential junkiness of our culture and biology
Examining cybernetic structures from genetic codes to communication networks, Thierry Bardini explores the idea that most of culture and nature, including humans, is composed of useless, but always potentially recyclable, material otherwise known as ‘junk.’ Junkware examines the cultural history that led to the encoding and decoding of life itself and the contemporary turning of these codes into a commodity.
“This book is thrilling. No other book takes the problem of junk (and especially junk DNA) so seriously; no other book takes the question of what molecular biology has done to us so thoroughly. Thierry Bardini’s answer is that we have literally become junk—Homo Nexus. In the age of genetic capitalism, we’ve moved beyond Deleuze’s societies of control and into an age of infinite repurposing. At the very moment that many are celebrating ‘remix culture’ Bardini's book provides a wild and weird wake-up call. We are junk, junk is us. Junkware will help us sort it out.”
— Christopher Kelty, author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
From University of Minnesota Press website:
The essential junkiness of our culture and biology
Examining cybernetic structures from genetic codes to communication networks, Thierry Bardini explores the idea that most of culture and nature, including humans, is composed of useless, but always potentially recyclable, material otherwise known as ‘junk.’ Junkware examines the cultural history that led to the encoding and decoding of life itself and the contemporary turning of these codes into a commodity.
“This book is thrilling. No other book takes the problem of junk (and especially junk DNA) so seriously; no other book takes the question of what molecular biology has done to us so thoroughly. Thierry Bardini’s answer is that we have literally become junk—Homo Nexus. In the age of genetic capitalism, we’ve moved beyond Deleuze’s societies of control and into an age of infinite repurposing. At the very moment that many are celebrating ‘remix culture’ Bardini's book provides a wild and weird wake-up call. We are junk, junk is us. Junkware will help us sort it out.”
— Christopher Kelty, author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
2011 Creative Keynote Speaker
Doug Rice
Doug
Rice is the author of the forthcoming hybrid books: Between Appear
and Disappear and Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist. He was the author of
Blood of Mugwump (selected by Kathy Acker as runner-up FC2 First
Novel Award), A Good Cuntboy is hard to Find, and Skin Prayer:
fragments of abject memory. He was a co-editor of Federman: A to
X-X-X-X. He has just been awarded a residency at the Akademie Schloss
Solitude. His work has been published in numerous journals and
anthologies including Dirty Fabulous, Avant Pop: Fiction for a
Daydream Nation, Zyzzyva, Discourse, Fiction International, Plazm,
Gargoyle. His work has been translated into Polish, German, French,
and Spanish. He currently teaches theory, film and creative writing
at Sacramento State University. He taught previously at Kent State
University, La Roche College, Duquesne University and the University
Pittsburgh.
Jalal Toufic has called Doug Rice, “one of the most important religious writers alive today. I place him in the same sentence and breath as Batailles.”
Carole Maso calls Skin Prayer “a series of mysterious and deeply evocative meditations: erotic, sacred, tender, grave, profound.”
Kathy Acker writes: “[Rice creates] the most gorgeous sentences and rhythms…I’m drooling and I bet that even Faulkner, though dead, is taking notice.”
Dennis Cooper says that “Rice’s prose is a wondrous thing, a kind of porn on acid as transcribed by J.R.R.Tolkien…it’s as if Rice, in his high postmodernist fashion, set out to write a novel of the sort that Acker’s and Burroughs’ novels would want to have sex with.”
Jalal Toufic has called Doug Rice, “one of the most important religious writers alive today. I place him in the same sentence and breath as Batailles.”
Carole Maso calls Skin Prayer “a series of mysterious and deeply evocative meditations: erotic, sacred, tender, grave, profound.”
Kathy Acker writes: “[Rice creates] the most gorgeous sentences and rhythms…I’m drooling and I bet that even Faulkner, though dead, is taking notice.”
Dennis Cooper says that “Rice’s prose is a wondrous thing, a kind of porn on acid as transcribed by J.R.R.Tolkien…it’s as if Rice, in his high postmodernist fashion, set out to write a novel of the sort that Acker’s and Burroughs’ novels would want to have sex with.”
2011 Keynote Speaker
Wai Chee Dimock
In her work, Wai Chee
Dimock experiments with close readings across different widths of
space, and across a range of time-scales. Her most recent book,
Through
Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time
(Princeton University Press, 2006), received Honorable Mention for
both the James Russell Lowell Prize (Modern Language Association) and
the Harry Levin Prize (American Comparative Literature Association).
She is also the author of Empire
for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism
(Princeton University Press, 1989) and Residues
of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (University of California Press, 1996), as well as the co-editor of
several volumes, including (with Lawrence Buell) American
Literature and the Planet
(Princeton University Press, 2007). She was the co-editor (with
Bruce Robbins) of a special issue of PMLA
entitled “Remapping Genre” (October 2007) and has contributed to
publications such as American
Literature,
Narrative,
and American
Literary History.
She is currently at work on two books—an anthology, American
Literature and the World,
and a critical work, Many
Islams: American Literature and the Diversities of a Lived
Religion—as
well as a cross-over genre project, part elegy, part anthropology,
and part autobiography, entitled Looking
for the Grateful Dead: a Yale Professor’s Musical Diaries.
Since 2003, Wai Chee Dimock has been the William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. In addition to her work at Yale (since 1997), she has taught at Rutgers University, the University of California, San Diego, Harvard University, and Brandeis University. She also served as the literary advisor for Invitation to World Literature, a thirteen-part series that aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010.
Yale website: http://english.yale.edu/faculty-staff/wai-chee-dimock
Praise for Through Other Continents:
“In Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock has created a provocative and altogether compelling vision of American literature as a global phenomenon. At once a set of wide-ranging illustrations and a map for the future, her study will permanently alter the boundaries, and therefore the national implications, of American literary scholarship.” (Eric J. Sundquist, UCLA)
“This is a wonderful book, of the highest importance, which brings to fruition Dimock’s recent proposals in a number of articles. I expect the book to be very widely read, discussed, and no doubt debated. The book offers a model not merely for a new way to study American literature, but also the beginnings of a new relation between comparative literature and the study of American literature.” (Jonathan Arac, Columbia University)
Praise for Empire for Liberty:
“Dimock seems to me to be doing some of the most exciting work in American studies. Empire for Liberty will have wide influence not only among Melville scholars, but as a model of a new kind of historical scholarship that has absorbed (as distinct from imitated) ‘European theory’ and whose historicism is a form of sophisticated multidisciplinary analysis.” (Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University)
Since 2003, Wai Chee Dimock has been the William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. In addition to her work at Yale (since 1997), she has taught at Rutgers University, the University of California, San Diego, Harvard University, and Brandeis University. She also served as the literary advisor for Invitation to World Literature, a thirteen-part series that aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010.
Yale website: http://english.yale.edu/faculty-staff/wai-chee-dimock
Praise for Through Other Continents:
“In Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock has created a provocative and altogether compelling vision of American literature as a global phenomenon. At once a set of wide-ranging illustrations and a map for the future, her study will permanently alter the boundaries, and therefore the national implications, of American literary scholarship.” (Eric J. Sundquist, UCLA)
“This is a wonderful book, of the highest importance, which brings to fruition Dimock’s recent proposals in a number of articles. I expect the book to be very widely read, discussed, and no doubt debated. The book offers a model not merely for a new way to study American literature, but also the beginnings of a new relation between comparative literature and the study of American literature.” (Jonathan Arac, Columbia University)
Praise for Empire for Liberty:
“Dimock seems to me to be doing some of the most exciting work in American studies. Empire for Liberty will have wide influence not only among Melville scholars, but as a model of a new kind of historical scholarship that has absorbed (as distinct from imitated) ‘European theory’ and whose historicism is a form of sophisticated multidisciplinary analysis.” (Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University)
