UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies
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3rd Annual ELTS Graduate Student Conference: Speculative Futurities, Past and Present

The Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies 3rd Annual Graduate Student Conference

3rd Annual ELTS Graduate Student Conference: Speculative Futurities, Past and Present

Monday, November 13, 2023
9:45 AM - 8:00 PM

Royce Hall

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About the Keynote Speakers

Dr. Lydie Moudileno is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of French and American Studies and Ethnicity and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on literary and cultural productions from the Francophone world, in particular the Caribbean, and West and Central Africa, as well as postcolonial France. Her books have examined issues of authorship and metaliterary representations in Francophone Caribbean literature, post-Negritude Congolese fiction (2007) and contemporary African fiction (2013). She is the co-editor of several volumes and special issues on literary representations of blackness in Francophone fiction, and on writers Maryse Condé and Marie NDiaye. Her more recent work has focused examinations of race in contemporary French culture: Mythologies postcoloniales: Décoloniser le quotidien (Champion, 2018), a study of race in popular culture at the turn of the millennium inspired by the work of Roland Barthes, and Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Signs and Symbols in Modern France (Liverpool University Press, 2020), a collected volume investigating traces of the colonial past in contemporary France.

Dr. David Bates is Professor and Chair of Graduate Admissions in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. He works on two main research tracks: one on the history of legal and political ideas, and the other on the relationship between technology, science, and the history of human cognition.  Future work will bring these interests closer together, as his research will focus more on the connections between reason, technology, and the state as they develop in the age of cybernetic systems and the rethinking of the living organism in that context. He has just completed a book,  An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming Spring 2024) that probes the emergence of human thinking as an entanglement between machine technologies, somatic processes, media practices, and social/political organization. Beginning with an examination of Cartesian robotics and early modern reflections on automaticity, he goes on to show how "artificial intelligence" marks a peculiar stage in the history of reason, one that privileges the isolated mind. The critique of contemporary models of automatic cognition requires unwinding a certain history of automaticity spawned by this moment, and rediscovering another history of the human as it develops and evolves within technical systems.

Conference Schedule

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2023

9:45-10:45 Breakfast and Coffee/Tea and Registration (Balcony of Royce 306)

10:45-11:00 Opening Remarks (Royce 306)

11:00-12:30 Panel 1: Migratory and Diasporic Futures (Royce 306)
Moderator: Professor Niklas Salmos (Linnaeus University)

  • A ‘Future Italy’ through Africa: Annexing the Barbarians in Marinetti’s Mafarka il futurista and Il tamburo di fuoco, Ty Davidian (Stanford University)
  • An Exploration of Identity and Ecological Justice in Aimé Césaire’s “A Tempest”, Miranda Paikowski (University of Colorado-Boulder)
  • Case Nuove: Transnational Migration and the Life of an Italian Town, Craig Smith (UCLA)
12:30-13:30 Lunch Break (Royce 236)

13:30-15:00 Panel 2: Feminist Futures, Patriarchal Temporalities (Royce 306)

  • (Anti)Feminist Dystopias: Patriarchy and Religion in Houellebecq’s Soumission and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Sandrine F. Rajaonarivony (University of Pennsylvania)
  • Against Patriarchal Time: Alternative Temporalities in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, Luca Pixner (Duke University)
  • The Intangible Author-Subject in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, Elena Schafer (University of Chicago)

15:00-15:30 Break (Balcony of Royce 306)

15:30-17:00 Panel 3: Aesthetic Temporalities (Royce 306)

  • Impossible Frames: Intoxication and Formlessness in Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein, Juan Camilo Velasquez (New York University)
  • Une poétique du noir lumière : la réversibilité du temps dans Nous le passage d’Henri Meschonnic, Marianne Godard (McGill University)
  • Let’s Dance: Being, Feeling, and Surviving in Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex Trilogy, André Pettman (Columbia University)

17:00-17:15 Short Break (Balcony 306)

17:15-18:45 Keynote Speech: Dr. Lydie Moudileno (USC) (Royce 306) “Afrofuturism and the Royal Imperative”

 TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2023

10:00-10:30 Breakfast and Coffee/Tea (Royce 306)

10:30-12:00 Panel 4: Futures Beyond the Human (Royce 306)

  • Trans-ending Bodies: Julia Ducournau’s Cyborg Offspring, Iliana Cuellar (UC-Riverside)
  • Contesting Cybernetic Futures, Lena Trüper (UCLA)
  • Moral Implications of Consciousness: Transhuman and Posthuman Beinghoods, Maria Larsson Pedersen (San Francisco State University)

12:00-13:00 Lunch Break (Royce 236)

13:00-14:00 Panel 5: Forging Futurities I (Royce 306)

  • Narrating the future perfect and the past-perfect continuous through the experience of deterritorialization and dematerialization in Mutt-Lon’s Ceux qui sortent dans la nuit, Murielle Sandra Tiako Djomatchoua (Princeton University)
  • Global Feminism: Speaking Back to Power to Shape a Better Future in Igiaba Scego’s Future and Cassandra a Mogadiscio, Dora Labate (Rutgers University)

14:00-14:30 Break (Balcony of Royce 306)

14:30-15:30 Panel 6: Forging Futurities II (Royce 306)

  •  Temporalities in Felix Ringel’s Back to the Postindustrial Future: Untangling Hoyerswerda’s History through Bloch and Hartog, Meghan Looney (University of Michigan)
  • Exploring Post Air War Germany’s Temporality Through Sebald’s Use of Imagery, Sophie Jin (University of Michigan)

15:30-16:30 Photography Session and Break (Balcony of 306)

16:30-18:00 Keynote Speech: Dr. David Bates (UC-Berkeley) “Failures of Anticipation: Machine Learning and the Crisis of Decision”

18:00-20:00 Reception

Venue

Royce Hall
10745 Dickson Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095

Parking

Parking for Royce Hall is available in Parking Structure 5 located at: 302 Charles E Young Dr N, Westwood, Los Angeles, CA 90095. Parking Structure 5  is accessible from Royce Drive, south of Sunset Boulevard, and west of Hilgard Ave. (in the northeast section of the campus). Alternatively, Parking Structure 4 is also close to the venue and has Pay-By-Space Visitor Parking available.

Guest drop/Ride-share drop off is closest at the turnaround at the front of Royce Hall located at: 10745 Dickson Court, Los Angeles, CA 90095.

Accessible parking: If you have accessibility needs, you may park in the Pay-By-Space/Visitor Parking area on the rooftop (level 5) of this structure, and proceed to the Self-Service Pay Station machine to pay by credit card.  Please visit our Campus Accessibility Map to view related information.

Sponsors

The 3rd Annual ELTS Graduate Student Conference is made possible through the generous support of the Departments of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, Art History, Philosophy, European Languages & Transcultural Studies, Film, Television & Digital Media, Comparative Literature, History, Asian Languages & Cultures, World Arts and Cultures/Dance, Geography, Center for European and Russian Studies, Center for Early Global Studies, Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the Clark Library, Center for the Study of Women/Barbra Streisand Center, Urban Humanities Initiative/City Lab, UCLA African Studies Center, the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies with support from the Alan D. Leve Endowment for Research Innovation, the College of Humanities Dean’s Discretionary Fund, and the GSA Discretionary Fund.

 


Related Document: ELTS-3rd-Annual-Graduate-Student-Conference-tl-ghd.pdf