18th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference Hosted by the Department of English at Indiana University Bloomington
Panels and Presentations
Stream 1, Panel 1: The Worlds Words Make
Mitch Hernandez, “Four Theses on World Traveling Against the University”
Mitch Hernandez is a PhD student in the Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at the University of Minnesota. His work arises from the intersection of poverty and the postimmigrant identity. At the center of his thought are questions of neoliberalism: its dissemination, its material shaping of the world, its mythologies, as well as subjective life under its regimes of power.
Joseph S. Vuletich, “Disconcerting Discourses: The Rhetorical Refusals and Ironic Identities of Donald Trump and Ryan Wash”
Joseph Vuletich is a Ph.D. student studying rhetoric and the stories we use to structure different ways of knowing through science and technology. Having taught high school science, he is particularly invested in complex reading strategies and literacies that empower students to build from the knowledge that they already use rather than appropriate ostensibly neutral standards or facts. When he’s not busy trying to articulate his own passions, he enjoys walks, bike rides, games, and conversations with his son, Leo, and partner, Heidi.
Andrew Ash, “How to Thing New Worlds”
Andrew Ash is a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Alabama. His research focus is poetry, poetics and the theory of reading.
Stream 1, Panel 2: Speculative and Emergent Worldmaking
Tess J. Given, Fantasy Maps and Colonial Worldbuilding
Tess Given is interested in world building, as it happened in literatures of the past and stories of the future. They are currently a PhD student at IU working on how early humanism in the eighteenth century can speak with contemporary science fiction about the structures through which we understand and pattern the world. They’re excited to present this paper, as it represents their recent methodological experimentation and an opportunity to draw between two vastly different but deeply interconnected time periods.
Samuel Chirtel, The Dharma Side of the Moon: The Astro-Orientalism of James V. Ogle’s The Blind Turtle
Sam is a PhD student, science fiction writer, and former biophyicist. His research focuses on late twentieth century and early twenty-first century British and American science fiction, particularly SF texts that explore religious and metaphysical themes. Before coming to IU, Sam received a B.A. in Biophysics from The John Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The University of Colorado Boulder. A lifelong animal lover, Sam dreams about the giant squid, misses the moose in Colorado, and is the proud parent of a three-year-old Boxer/German Shepherd mix named Jax.
Robert Motum, Uttered into Being: The World-Building Performatives of Micronationhood
About This Site
This site serves as an archive of Indiana University's 18th annual interdisciplinary graduate conference, hosted by the Department of English over the weekend of April 16-17, 2021. This was the first time that this conference was held online. The panels that this site archives were watched asynchronously, with synchronous discussion occurring over dedicated Zoom sessions and a conference Discord server.
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Conference materials were originally hosted on a WordPress site, but WordPress does not offer free hosting, so panels and presentations from the original site have been moved here so that they can live in perpetuity.
Robert Motum is a playwright, director, and artist-researcher. With a background in site specific performance, Robert has staged work on an active city bus, in a castle, over Snapchat, in a dorm room, in a gallery, in a vacant Target store, and occasionally even in a theatre space. He is the playwright of A Community Target, a documentary play which examines the collapse of American retailer, Target, in Canada. He holds an MA in Practising Performance from Aberystwyth University (Wales), a BA in Honours Drama from the University of Waterloo, and is a current PhD student in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.
Lucy Nield, “If You Listened to the Animals You’d Understand”: Speculative Uplift Fiction and Living with Nonhuman Animals
Lucy Nield is a PhD student in the Department of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests includes animal studies, speculative fiction, posthumanism and anthropomorphism within science fiction. She is an organizer for the Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference at the University of Liverpool and the PGR English Rep for the School of The Arts for her second consecutive year. Lucy also teaches first year English Literature at the University since 2020.
Stream 1, Panel 3: Ecocritical Potentialities: Human-Nature Relationships in Literature, Composition, and Mythology
Madison Shockley, Ecocomposition: Nature and Ecology in a Composition Classroom
Madison Shockley is a Graduate Teaching Associate at Chapman University, teaching English 103: Rhetoric of Environmentalism as she completes the last semester of her MA English program. She has earned her BA in English from UCLA. Her current scholarship is primarily rooted in collaborative learning, process/post-process pedagogy, workshop design, reflection, and community engagement.
Paolena Comouche, Ecofeminist Rhetorics: Mythological Associations of Nature and Women
Paolena Comouche is currently completing her last semester in the English MA program at Chapman University, where she also teaches a first-year Seminar in Rhetoric and Composition as a Graduate Teaching Associate. She earned her BA from California State University, Fullerton, and is planning to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition beginning this fall. Her academic specialization is Feminist Rhetorics, Gender Studies, New Materialism, and Composition Theory.
Jillian Sanchez, Decolonizing Nature: Explorations of the Natural World in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
Jillian Sanchez is a California native, earning her master’s degree from Chapman University. As an English literature major, Jillian has developed an interest in multicultural literature and postcolonialism, particularly Native American literature. Jillian hopes to earn her PhD and use that to continue work on bringing Native narratives to the classroom.
Ethan Trejo, The Magical Potentiality of Queer Ecology in When the Moon Was Ours
Ethan is an MA in English candidate at Chapman University in Orange, CA. He currently serves as a Graduate Teaching Associate at Chapman, teaching courses in Rhetoric and Composition. His scholarship is focused primarily on the fields of Literary Theory, Queer and Gender Studies, and Latino/a Studies. His major research interests lie in YA Literature, Contemporary Queer and Latinx Literature, Latinx and Queer Temporalities, and Popular Culture.
Stream 1, Panel 4: Navigating Worlds Across Centuries
Tomos Morris, “Make Use of What I Leave in Love”: Anne Bradstreet’s Imparted World
Tomos Morris is a Cardiff based writer currently studying a Masters degree in English Literature at Bath Spa University. His current academic interests include postmodernism, alternative pedagogy, and representations of the historical subject.
Samuel Evola, Reconciling Worlds: Standards of Judgment in Clarissa and Lady Susan
Samuel is a Ph.D. student at IU-Bloomington. His research focuses on formal features of realist fiction. He also works in psychology lab investigating narrative’s effects on readers.
Abby Clayton, Lost and Found: Victorian Travelers and the Sensationalizing Domesticity of Jane Austen
Abby Clayton is an English Literature MA/PhD student at Indiana University – Bloomington specializing in Victorian studies and, more broadly, nineteenth-century transatlanticism. Her research primarily focuses on tourism and questions of reception and local and national heritage, a passion sparked by her work in England with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Her questions are largely informed by historicist and archival methods, bringing print, material, and visual culture to bear on celebrity author figures and their works. She aims to unpack how and why community narratives and identities were formed, spread, and exchanged through the long nineteenth century, and, subsequently, how they have been perpetuated by heritage organizations today.
Sami Atassi, Concerning Some Cracks Behind Poe’s Arabesque
Sami Atassi is a PhD candidate in English at Indiana University. He received his BA in Arts and Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas and his MA in English/American literature and a Graduate Certificate in Empire Studies from the University of Houston. His dissertation explores the rhetorical and philosophical affordances of representations of laughter, terror, and violence in controversial works of satire written during the antebellum period.
Stream 2, Panel 1: Earthy and Earthly Worlds in the Making
Rakesh Kumar Pankaj, Religious Environmentalism and Magadhi Folk Songs: An Ecocritical Study
Rakesh Kumar Pankaj is a Doctoral Scholar of English Literature at IIT Ropar, Punjab. He has done his Graduation, Post-graduation from BHU, and M. Phil from Central University of Haryana. His research interests include Ecocriticism, Folk Literature, and Religious Environmentalism. He also works with Dr Dibyakusum Ray on a project of Royal Holloway
College, London University.
Michal Krawczyk, Tree Elbow: A Neo-Peasant Response
Michal Krawczyk is a PhD candidate at Griffith University. He is an environmental humanist working with the arts of moving images.
Reese Menefee, Something Came Up Out of the Water
Reese Menefee is from Kentucky. She is an MFA poetry candidate at McNeese State University in Louisiana
David Lombard, Revisiting America’s Last Frontier: Richard Proenneke’s and Ernestine Hayes’s ‘Worlds’ and Ecological Sublimes
David Lombard is a research fellow at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and a Ph.D. candidate in literary studies at the universities of Liège (ULiège) and Leuven (KU Leuven) (joint degree) where he is an active member of the research centers CIPA (Interdisciplinary Center of Applied Poetics), Intersections and the Leuven English Literature Research Group. His main fields of interests are American literary studies, environmental humanities, narrative theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics. He is the author of the book Techno-Thoreau: Aesthetics, Ecology and the Capitalocene (2019) which served as an extended pilot study for his broader Ph.D. project on the textual afterlife of the sublime in U.S. contemporary literature (2020-2024).
Stream 2, Panel 2: Writing, Reading, and Contesting the Modern
Angelica Maria Barraza, Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven’s Poetics of (Gender)Nonconformity
Angelica Maria Barraza holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from Naropa University and is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of California at Riverside. Her research as well as her creative work plumb the intersection(s) of race, gender, and poetic form.
Anne Duncan, Ekphrasis and the Imagination: The Material and Phenomenal Double-Life of Images in Adam Vines’ Out of Speech
Anne Duncan is a predoctoral student in English at the University of Washington, where she teaches writing composition and works on modern and contemporary American poetry, aesthetics and affect. She holds a BA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, and her poetry reviews can be found at 32 Poems and Bone Bouquet magazine. Anne is from Brooklyn, NY and currently lives in Seattle, WA.
Mikaela Renshaw, Bawns and Bros: Heaney and Headley’s Beowulf Translations as Modernist Texts
Mikaela Renshaw is currently pursuing her PhD in English Language and Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research primarily focuses on the epic and romance genres, with a broader interest the qualities of kingship and heroism and how those ideals translate across genres.
Elizabeth Le, A Library of One’s Own: Reader’s Worlds and the Institution
Elizabeth Le is a fourth-year English major with a minor in Digital Media. As part of her English Honors and Liberal Arts Honors thesis, she is researching topics concerning the interactions between readers, text, and conceptions of physical and cognitive spaces in Modernism. She is particularly interested in the idea of a “transforming media ecology” and how that relates to the effects of technology on present-day human environments and society. At present, Elizabeth is looking forward to pursuing a PhD in information science this upcoming fall. It is her hope that through her research, she can discover the patterns of digital design that uphold an ethical, accessible, and empathetic relationship with users.
Annette Marie Skade, “Fenestra Locutaria”: Speech Act and Silence in the Poetry of Anne Carson
Annette has just finished a PhD entitled “Allusion and Intertext in the Poetry of Anne Carson”, at Dublin City University. She has an MA in Poetry Studies and a BA in Ancient Greek and Philosophy. She has written an article on materiality in Anne Carson’s work for the journal Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, University of Thessaloniki, and various articles on Anne Carson for non-specialist audiences. She is also a poet, and her first collection Thimblerig was published in 2013. You can read more about Annette’s poetry here. http://annetteskade.com/
Stream 2, Panel 3: Unworlding/Reworlding Politics and Theory
Nicolás Juárez, Leaving for the Sixth World: Indigenous Philosophy and the Politics of Leaving the World
Nicolás Juárez is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work. Utilizing an interdisciplinary framework that draws from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Critical Ethnic Studies, Social Work, and the Natural Sciences, his work interrogates the structure of the libidinal economy of settler colonialism. In particular, his research focuses on the ways in which sexual violence against Native Americans reveals essential features of settler colonialism globally.
Andrew Cutrone, The Earth and ‘The World’
Andrew Cutrone is a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of Texas – Austin. His work straddles sociology, critical theory, and black (feminist) studies. In addition to his work on abolitionist theorizing which this conference paper indexes, his work broadly concerns the radical possibilities of subjectivity, namely, in what he calls “accomplice work.”
James Neisen, The Charm of Affect Theory for Literary and Cultural Criticism
James Neisen is currently in the dissertation stage of the English Ph.D. Program at Indiana University. His dissertation focuses on charm, masculinity, and affect theory. He received his B.A. from Vanderbilt University, and also has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University and an M.A. in English from DePaul University.
Maryam Ahmadi, Political Economy of the Visceral: Or, How to Do Things with Guts
Maryam Ahmadi is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is on decolonial thinking, Persian rhetorics, and political economy of communication.
Stream 3, Panel 1: Troubling World Boundaries
Kate Yanchulis, Growing the Game: Building a Better World for Women in Sport
Kate Yanchulis is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Her research interests lie at the intersections of sports, media and gender. She also works as a sports journalist for the Washington Post.
Jane Willsie, This Is a Becoming-woman: Female Language as a Form of Deleuze and Guattari’s Minor Literature in Death and The King’s Horseman
Jane Willsie graduated from Queen’s University in 2017 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts focusing on English Literature. After traveling and teaching abroad, she returned to Canada to pursue a Masters of Arts in English at the University of Columbia. Primarily, Jane is interested in theories of subjectivity and power relating to the formation of geographically varied modernisms, particularly in the works of South Korean and Asian-Canadian literature.
Kathryn H. Stutz, Saints Who Never Existed: Relics of Franklin’s Lost Arctic Expedition and the Archaeology of a Queer Narrative
Kathryn H. Stutz is a PhD student in the Department of Classics at Johns Hopkins University. Though primarily interested in the life and legacy of the Roman senator Marcus Tullius Cicero, Kathryn also conducts research on the history of Victorian-era polar expeditions and recently gave a paper titled “Britannia’s Sons: Classical Reception in Louisa Capper Coningham’s Poetical History of England and the Textual Universe of Sir John Franklin’s Lost Arctic Expedition” at the 2021 Annual Meeting for the Society of Classical Studies. Kathryn’s translation of Sappho’s “Brothers Poem,” blending the perspectives of ancient Greek lyric with 19th century maritime history, will appear in the forthcoming Spring 2021 issue of the translation journal Ancient Exchanges.
Stream 3, Panel 2: Worlds of Race, Place, and Diaspora
Christopher Mendez, Conquistadors in Hard Hats: Racial Capitalism and Colonization in Quinceañera and The Madonnas of Echo Park
I am a Literature M.A./ PhD student minoring in Gender Studies. I received my BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. My research interests include ethnic American literature, LGBTQ+ studies, and media studies, with a focus on the representation of race, class, and gender in TV, film, and literature. I enjoy watching and reading material that examines how systems of power act upon multiple aspects of identity to maintain racial and class-based hierarchies. Recently, I have conducted research on the portrayal of gentrification as a form of racialized consumption in contemporary Latinx TV shows and films.
Nadine Valcin, Oh Canada! Our Home and Haunted Land: A Meditation on Space, Memory, and Blackness
Nadine Valcin is a filmmaker and media artist based in Toronto. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Digital Futures program at OCAD University as well as the Archive/Counter Archive artist-in-residence at Library and Archives Canada.
Fidel García Reyes, World-Making Along Diasporic Edges in We the Animals by Justin Torres
Fidel García Reyes was born in Guerrero, México. He completed a Master’s in Gender Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City and moved to the U.S. in 2016. Fidel is also a fiction writer. He has published numerous short stories and his first novel, La estatua de Azúcar, was published in 2017. He is currently a first-year PhD student at UT-Austin in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Stream 3, Panel 3: Cruel Utopia: Violent Ideologies and the Construction of Social Orders
Sam Moe, “A Contemporary Retelling of the Divine Comedy: The Underworld as Bottom of the Iceberg”
​Sam Moe is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at Illinois State University. Her research focuses on the presentation of visual rhetoric and the restaurant industry, as well as hybrid writing as a means of reconstructing the trauma narrative by braiding poetry, non-fiction, fiction, and translation in novel-form.
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Phil Spotswood, Into an Apocryphal Future: Anti-Elegies and Queer Family-Making
Phil Spotswood is a poet from Alabama. His work can be found most recently in Always Crashing, Berkeley Poetry Review, Dreginald, and BAEST. He is currently a PhD student at Illinois State University, and his interests lie in queer theories and poetics.
Edcel Javier Cintron-Gonzalez, Ozpin’s Utopian Hope & Boredom Towards Salem’s Dystopian Fear: An Insight of Utopian Vision in RWBY
Edcel Javier Cintron-Gonzalez is a second year Ph.D. student in the English Studies program at Illinois State University. Edcel is currently specializing in Children’s and Young Adult Literature with a sub focus in Women, Sexuality and Gender Studies, and Material Rhetoric. When Edcel is not focusing on academic work, you can find him playing video games, reading a bunch of graphic novels, trying out new recipes, zooming with friends and family, and thinking about his island of enchantment, known as Puerto Rico.
Nina Hanee Jang, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite: Coloniality of Modernity and World-System of Oppression
Nina Hanee Jang is a PhD student at Illinois State University.