Speakers & Announcements

The Cultural Studies M.A. & Ph.D programs sponsor annual speakers' series providing an opportunity for our students to hear and meet some of the most exciting and innovative scholars in the humanities and social sciences. There are opportunities to socialize with our visitors afterwards. As always, these presentations are open to all members of the university community.

The annual John Fekete Distinguished Lecture series was established in November 2011 and inaugurated in November 2013, by the Cultural Studies PhD Program to honour John Fekete on his retirement from Trent in 2012. The idea of the lectureship is to invite distinguished visitors to the university to share their most recent or forthcoming publications that are influential and important in the field of cultural inquiry.

2018-19 Academic Year

Joe Yang
Doctoral Candidate, Cultural Studies Program, Trent
October 11, 2018, 7:30PM

The Endless Everyday: How people fight and nourish apocalyptic thought

On July 6 2018 the former leader of doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo was executed by hanging. Aum Shinrikyo was responsible for releasing impure sarin gas on the Tokyo subway, leading to the deaths of 13 individuals and over a thousand injuries. As a response to the incident, sociologist Shinji Miyadai wrote the book Owarinaki Nichijo o ikiro! Oum kanzen kokufuku manyuaru (translated as “Living an endless everyday! A manual on how to defeat Aum”), where Shinji discusses the concept of everydayness. In this talk, I want to discuss how apocalypticism depends on a particular sense of everydayness. Drawing off the work of Frank Kermode, Ian Reader, and Benjamin Zeller, I look at how doomsday cults like Aum Shinrikyo and Heaven’s Gate understood the everyday and how they actively incorporated everydayness to legitimize group catastrophization. I also look at how everydayness as both a quasi-practice and an idea persists outside of organized doomsday cults, mainly in popular media. Specifically, I look at the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster, arguing that everydayness is not unique to cults, but rather is ingrained in general apocalyptic thought.

Joe is a PhD Cultural Studies student who completed is M.A. at the University of Waterloo. He is researching the subject of ideology through the apocalypse in games and is supervised by Professors Liam Mitchell and Michael Epp. His research interests include animation, ludology, eschatology, low art. He is also a video essayist of inconsistent quality.

Hanjo Berressem
University of Cologne
Economies of Greed in Late Pynchon: America and the Logic of Capital

This talk reads Pynchon’s late work Bleeding Edge as a dark allegory of the logic of infinite greed and entitlement that pervades 20th century America. In the light of Pynchon’s allegorical anger about how America has dealt with 9/11, this talk revisits the early assessment of Pynchon’s works as Jeremiads.

Hanjo Berressem teaches American Literature at the University of Cologne. In addition to over 100 articles on contemporary American fiction, media studies, the interfaces of art and science as well as ecology, he has published books on Thomas Pynchon (Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text, 1992), Witold Gombrowicz (Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz’s Fiction with Lacan, 1998) and on the notion of Eigenvalue (Eigenvalue: On the Gradual Contraction of Media in Movement / Contemplating Media in Art [Sound | Image | Sense], 2018). Two new books, Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy and Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology, will be published in 2019.

Nadine Boljkovac
Falmouth University
[Non]Style is Feeling: Direct Tenderness from Sirk and Fassbinder to Haynes

Style, or nonstyle as Gilles Deleuze suggests, exposes the foreign within the familiar. Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes reveal characters-cum-prisoners trapped within ‘normativity.’ At the same time, their films envision alternative trajectories for the women effecting lasting reverberations, a feelingof events for the characters and us.

Nadine Boljkovac (PhD, University of Cambridge) is a Falmouth University Senior Lecturer, a 2018 Visiting Fellow, Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, and a 2018-19 Research Fellow, Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies, University of Cologne. Her monograph in progress, Beyond Herself: Feminist (Auto)Portraiture and the Moving Image, follows Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (2013). Recent peer-reviewed works appear in ‘Materialising Absence in Film and Media,’ a Screening the Past Special Dossier (co-edited with S. Walton, 2018), The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (eds Tom Conley & Hunter Vaughan, 2018) and Interdisciplinary Articulations (2018).

2017-18 Academic Year

Victoria de Zwaan
Professor, Cultural Studies Trent University

March 22, 2017, 7:30PM

Snow White-ness: Fairy-Tales, Adaptation, Metafiction

Drawing on adaptation studies, folklore studies, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory, Victoria de Zwaan will discuss her current project on the narrative territories explored and invoked by contemporary film and print adaptations of the “Snow White” fairy tale.

Dr. Victoria de Zwaan, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent, works in the field of literary cultural studies; teaches courses in experimental fiction, adaptation theory, and narrative theory; and has written or given conference papers about a diverse, international range of experimental writers including Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Milorad Pavic, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Mark Danielewski, and Robert Coover.

Liam Young
Faculty, School of Journalism & Communication, Carleton University
March 15, 2017, 7:30PM

On Lists, Salt, Beavers and the Pursuit of Paradigms in Media Theory

In this seminar, we will consider media theory as a tradition that is primarily interested in the study of paradigms. I will test the proposition that the paradigm, as formulated by Foucault and extended by Agamben, offers a useful heuristic to understand, especially, certain of the conceptual, methodological, and stylistic approaches to studying culture and technology that are commonly associated with Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and others lumped together as the ’Toronto School’ of communication.

Liam Cole Young is a faculty member in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University and a Research Fellow with the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus University Weimar. He is the author of List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed (Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

Rosemary Hennessy
L.H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and professor of English, Rice University, Houston, Texas
February 8, 2018, 7:30PM
Intimate Environments: Considering the Muriel Rukeyser Archive

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) is most well-known as a poet who was loosely affiliated with Communist Party activities in her early twenties. Rukeyser travelled to West Virginia accompanied by a photographer friend to report on the deaths of hundreds of miners from silicosis, events she documented in her monumental poem, The Book of the Dead (1938). This work and her research on the history of physical chemistry, together with the archives of her lifelong loves, offer provocations for feminist theory to consider the scope of what we mean by environments and the intimacies they shelter.

Dr. Rosemary Hennessy is the L.H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and is a faculty affiliate with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality which she directed from 2006-2015. Her current research project considers the work of women writers whose reportage and fiction of and about the 1930s challenges conventional understandings of time, labour, bio-regulation, and the erotic, and has much to teach us about maintaining life in the twenty-first century.

Presented by The Annual Elaine Stavro Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Theory, Politics & Gender

Suzanne Bailey
Professor, English, Director, M.A. English Literature (Public Texts)
January 18, 2017, 7:30PM

From 'Beer Street' to the 'Apocalypse': Intaglio Printmaking as New (Old) Media

Within the spaces of modernism and in modernist studies more broadly, the studio of Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988) had a crucial yet still under-recognized function as a site of experimentation centred on burin engraving and other forms of intaglio printmaking. Suzanne Bailey will discuss her current research on Hayter’s Paris studio and his Canadian students, focusing on Hayter’s reinvention of engraving as a medium of original artistic expression. Her talk will trace the history of engraving, from its role in early book illustration to Hayter’s modernist appropriation of this historical technique.

Suzanne Bailey is Professor in the Department of English at Trent. Her current research project is entitled “Lines: Atelier 17, the Art of the Print, and Canadian Modernism,” and focuses on the intaglio printmaking, print culture, and the travels of Canadian artists to Paris in the 1950s and 60s.

Dr. David Fancy
Associate professor of the Department of Dramatic Arts at Brock University
November 23, 2017, 7:30PM
‘I Scream the Body Electric’: Performance, Zombies, and Emergent Societies of Entrainment

This interdisciplinary presentation engages the notion of ‘field bodies,’ ones that result from collective nodes of coherent electromagnetic and affective excitations. Using the paradigmatic figure of the 'cell phone zombie,' Dr. David Fancy thinks through some of the implications of dynamics of entrainment—or 'resonant manipulation'–for performance practices and for social control more widely. The work draws on philosophy, performance studies, cultural studies, political theory, as well as science and technology studies.

Image: Cellphone Zombies acrylic on "/20" canvas. Original Art. Jack Larson

Brent Ryan Bellamy
Canada Research Chair Postdoctoral Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta
October 19, 2017, 7:30PM
The Post-Apocalyptic Mode in the Age of US Decline

The imaginary post-apocalyptic interregnum is the realm of historical and generic holdover. The apocalyptic event of such stories creates a new fictional plot line that branch off from reality towards imagined futures. Grasped as the defining characteristic of a post-apocalyptic mode, the post-apocalyptic storyworld provokes a doubled and emphatically political injunction to imagine both the consequences of the historical present—“this future is where we could end up if we continue to behave as we do today”—just as it asks us to imagine what might be possible, or foreclosed, were this world to be wiped away. The historical present extends into the storyworld even as the imagined apocalyptic event negates it. Judith Merril’s Shadows on the Heart (1950) offers a realistic look at human survival of the atomic bomb; Paul Auster’s In The Country of Last Things (1987) depicts the temporality of homelessness; Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones (2015) imagines the future of reproductive rights.

The history of US post-apocalyptic novels tracks the emergence and development of a fantasy of the United States returning to its status as global hegemon. By imagining a future without enough material wealth to be shared among the survivors, despite massive reduction in population, post-apocalyptic novels describe a situation uncannily like the one that capital’s ideologues would have people believe they live in today. In the uncertain present, these novels offer a way of describing the management of anxiety—personal, corporate, and governmental—at the sunset of the long twentieth century. Post-apocalyptic novels treat crisis as opportunity and encourage an understanding of history that counter-intuitively valorizes the individual over the collective and a return to the way things were over change. The valorization of the individual and the desire for a return to the status quo resonate with both long-established tendencies in the American political imaginary and with the neoliberal ethos that emerged to become America’s most significant export after World War II.

James Penney

Department of Cultural Studies and Department of French and Francophone Studies

October 5, 2017, 7:30PM
Strangers on a Train: Genet and the Liquidity of Being

Towards the end of the 1950s, Jean Genet writes a series of experimental, deeply idiosyncratic essays that set his lived encounter with an ugly old man in a train carriage alongside suggestive evocations of artworks by Giacometti and Rembrandt. Scandalously (for art criticism), Genet pays no attention to the fact that the man is “real” and Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride, for example, is “only” a painting. In this salon presentation I begin to develop the significance of Genet’s unconcern for the medium. I argue that his strange essays set in motion the speculative description of an uncanny liquid being that estranges us from our own humanity; a being that hauntingly sets the terms for our engagement with the visible world as such.

2016-17 Academic Year

Dominic Pettman
Professor of Culture and Media at the New School for Social Research and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at Eugene Lang College (New York City)
November 3, 2016
Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics

Roland Barthes famously discusses what he calls “the punctum”: the unexpected element of a photograph which pricks or wounds the viewer, thus creating an uncanny, authentic connection between people across very different moments in time. This talk introduces and explores a sonic analog to this concept – an “aural punctum” (first, as it relates to the gendered female voice, and then more generally across different species). This paper seeks to better understand how “the voice” might be a site of not only human communication, but also “creaturely” concern (whales, parrots, etc.). Indeed, it asks to what extent we can take seriously the possibility of a non-subjective expression of the elements themselves – a “voice of nature” – without succumbing to New Age delusions. Quite simply: who or what can rightly claim to have a voice? Is it a property or capacity that belongs to a subject, even a nonhuman subject (such as SIRI)? Or might “the voice” be located somewhere between beings of very different existential types (and thus potentially creating a sympathetic bridge between them)?
This year’s speaker is Dominic Pettman, Professor of Culture and Media, Chair of the Liberal Studies Program at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts in the New School for Social Research in New York. Professor Pettman has published books and essays on an impressive array of subjects, including, technology, love and the (post) human condition, the internationalization of Cultural Studies, the work of Jean Baudrillard, and contemporary media theory and media environments. The topic of his lecture draws on the work he has done for his forthcoming book Sonic Intimacy (Stanford UP, 2017). For more information about Dominic Pettman

Presented by the John Fekete Distinguished Lecture series

Diana Coole
Professor of Political and Social Theory, Birkbeck University of London
November 17, 2016
Dirt: A New Materialist Approach

The 2016 Elaine Stavro Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Theory, Politics & Gender welcomes Dr. Diana Coole, professor of Politics, Birkbeck College, London University.
In recent years there’s been a lot of interest in a new materialism. Central to this approach is its insistence that critical thinking needs to return to matter. But what does this mean? What sort of materiality is at stake here? How does this `new’ approach differ from older forms of materialism? This talk addressed such questions by focusing on a particular kind of matter: dirt. Dirt has become a topic of interdisciplinary fascination in its own right over recent years. But what do new materialist theories of and co-performances with dirt bring to the topic that is new? Inversely, what do their understanding and encounters with dirt reveal about a distinctively new materialist approach? By exploiting the ambiguous senses dirt carries - as soil and dust; as rubbish and waste; as an artistic resource that manifests `agency’ - my talk focuses on some key new materialist themes: the nature of material agency; the relationship between the human and the non-human; a critical theory of contemporary matter-flows from the perspective of their environmental harm.
Dr. Diana Coole is professor of Political and Social Theory, Birkbeck University of London. Her research interests include modern and contemporary political and social theory. Her work has focused primarily on the critical theory of the early Frankfurt School and its influences (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber), existential phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty in particular), poststructuralism (especially Foucault) and feminism. Professor Coole is the author of several articles and books including, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto.

Presented by The Annual Elaine Stavro Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Theory, Politics & Gender

2015-16 Academic Year

Colin Milburn
Professor: Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities
November 5, 2015
Science Fiction and the Project of Posthumanist Science

The 2015 Fekete lecturer was Colin Milburn, who holds the Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities at University of California, Davis. A Professor in English, Science and Technology Studies, and Cinema and Technocultural Studies, Milburn's research and publications focus on the relations of literature (especially Science Fiction and Gothic Horror), science, and technology, with a particular emphasis on nanotechnologies.
This lecture addressed the curious relationship of science fiction to modern science and the production of high-tech futures. Focusing on a historical case study—the physicist Gerald Feinberg's theorization of tachyons—and then expanding to consider broader intersections of speculative fiction and experimental research in recent decades, Colin Milburn showed the extent to which science fiction as a narrative genre and a mode of discourse propagates a posthumanist way of doing science, disordering inherited distinctions between mythology and technology, present and future, the human subject and its alternatives.
For more information about Colin Milburn.