Plan to attend this free, public symposium presented by The University of Tulsa English Graduate Student Association on April 3, 2021. This event is co-sponsored by The University of Tulsa’s Women’s and Gender Studies program.
Our keynote speaker will be Kristin Mahoney (Michigan State University), a leading scholar of late-Victorian Decadence and its 20th-century afterlives.
This year’s symposium will be held virtually via Teams. Join here.
Agenda
12-12:10 p.m.
- Welcome and opening remarks
12:10-1:30 p.m.
- Onyx Zhang (The University of Tulsa), “Autism Spectrum Disorder and Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy'”
- Grace Cosby (SW Oklahoma State University), “The Contagion in Wuthering Heights“
- Ciara Graham (The University of Tulsa), “Wuthering Heights and the Role of White Women in Inciting Racial Panic”
- Daniel Thater (University of Missouri), “From L.A. to Acorn: Community in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower“
1:30-1:40 p.m.
- Break
1:40-3 p.m.
- Muriel Unseth (The University of Tulsa), “Panic, Prolonged: Ulysses as an Expression of Great War Anxieties”
- Stephanie Almand (University of Central Arkansas), “Male Hysteria: The Awakening of Leonce’s Female Identity in The Awakening“
- Jacob Crystal (The University of Tulsa), “Queer Monsters: The Technology of Monstrosity in Rebecca“
- Jamie Walt (The University of Tulsa), “Drawing from Trauma: Visuality and the Graphic Novel as Play Therapy in Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters“
3-3:10 p.m.
- Break
3:10-4:10 p.m.
Keynote Speaker: Kristin Mahoney (Michigan State University), “Richard Bruce Nugent, Harlem Decadence, and the Rupturing of Black Kinship”
Kristin Mahoney, PhD, is an associate professor and the associate chair of graduate studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. She is also the director of literary studies and a faculty fellow in the Center for Gender in a Global Context. Mahoney’s research focuses on late-Victorian Decadence and its afterlives in the 20th century. She is the author of Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and is currently completing a project entitled Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. In this study, she argues that late-Victorian Decadent ideas concerning affiliation and desire operated as models for a new generation of artists and writers in the 20th century who wished to operate outside the boundaries of the conventional, heteronormative family.