Tentative Schedule and Paper Titles:

Friday, October 2, 2009

9:30-11:30
The Literary Animal

Respondent: Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

Rahel Villinger: “Kant, Kafka, and Kater Murr: On the Mind of the Animal”

Darragh Martin: “‘Making the Asse to Speake’: Invisible Animals as Actors and Artifacts in Medieval English Theatre”

Anna Eyre: “Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop: Poetics of Animality”

Daniel Williams: “‘Vile Attentions’: Animals and the Limits of Attention in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians”

12:00-1:00
Keynote Address by Akira Lippit
“On Autobiography and (Animal) Locomotion.”

1:00-2:00
Lunch

2:30-4:00
The Ethical Animal

Respondent: Sheila Rodriguez

Matthew A. Axtell: “This is your Dolphin Calling: Winter v. NRDC (2008) and False Choices Between Wildlife and Technology in the Seas”

Joel Kropf: “Instrumental Effort and Moral Appraisal: The Trope of Animality in the Canadian Death-Penalty Debate, 1958-1976”

Taylor C. Nelms: “On Immigration, Emigration and Those who are Still Here:
Humans, Animals, and the Inhuman”

Saturday, October 3, 2009

10:00-12:00
The Artistic Animal

Respondent: Karen Beckman, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies, History of Art,
and Director of the program in Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Nachiket Chanchani: “Stable Identities in the Age of Humanism"

Charles Butcosk: “The Bear King’s Bride: From the animal to the human and back again in Franz Marc’s ‘Two Pictures’”

Jason Zuzga: "Blood on the Calypso: Viewing Frenzy in Jacques Cousteau's and Louis Malle's The Silent World"

Nijah Cunningham: “Projecting Black Life: The Animal in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep”

12:00-1:00
Darwin and the Animal

Kathryn Tabb: “Naturalizing the History of Reason: Charles Darwin and the Defense of Animal Agency”

Stassa Edwards: “‘Almost Sure to Mislead’: Rejlander, Darwin and The Apes"