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GEO Announces Program for GEO Conference

July 12, 2010 English

The committee for the Department of English's second annual GEO Conference invites faculty, students, and friends to attend on February 27th and 28th in Susquehanna Hall.

"(Media)tions: Translating the Body Politic" is the title for Maryland's Graduate English Organization for DC-Area graduate students from a variety of disciplines. Organizers say that this two-day event will proudly display the scholarship produced in the department.

"All Maryland graduate students should attend this conference just to see the work their friends, classmates, and colleagues are producing," says committee chair Joseph Kautzer. "We think we might know each other from class, but this conference will give us a new way to relate to each other. Often times we are surprised to learn just how much our interests overlap."

Included on the program are keynote lectures from Jonathan Gil Harris, Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, and Zita Nunes, Associate Professor of English and Director of Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland.

Excepting the Mock Turtle Reading by Maryland MFA students, all events will take place in Susquehanna Hall. For more information, please see the conference website.

Friday - February 27th, 2009

Welcome -- 1:30PM
Coffee, registration, meet and greet

Session 1 -- 2:00-3:15PM

Panel A: Rhetoric in Circulation: Tracing the Paths of Discourse in the Public Sphere

Heather Brown (Maryland, English) - "Creating Spaces for Abortion Trauma: Genre, Testimony, and the World Wide Web"

K. Martin Camper (Maryland, English) - "Prayer and Place: Creating Sacred Places in Virtual Spaces"

Lindsay Dunne (Maryland, English) - "Public Cure/Counterpublic Cause: the Rhetoric of Environmental Hazard in the Breast Cancer Awareness Movement(s)"

Bryan Snyder  (Maryland, Undergraduate, English) - "When Political Parties Change: an Examination of Changing Moral Structure in American Politics"

Panel B: Visualizing the Body

Patricia Fancher (Georgetown University, English) - "Life through the Lens: Cyborg Subjectivity and Cinematic Hybridity"

Maria Gigante (Maryland, English) -  "The Separation of Art and Text: Fitting Frontispieces into Early Modern Science"

Amy Karp (Maryland, English) - "Life and Death in the Liminal: Jenny Schecter's Jewish Matters and The L Word"

Naliyah Kaya (George Mason University, Sociology) - "A New Deal for New Orleans: H.R. 4048: Gulf Coast Civic Works Act"

Session 2 -- 3:30-4:45PM

Panel C: Mediating Science: The Rhetoric of Scientific Discourse

Michelle Lang Boswell (Maryland, English) - "The Question of an Exclamation:  Feynman's Style in Six Easy Pieces"

Daniel DioGuardi (Maryland, English) - "'Where Phenomena Tend to Collide': Anzaldúa, Individuation, and (Sub)conscious (Border) Spaces"

Nathan Kelber (Maryland, English) - "From Archimedes to Robinson: The Rhetoric of the Infinitesimal"

Katherine Young (Maryland, English) - "Mary Anning's Monster: Literature, Spectacle, and the Plesiosaur"

Panel D: Pyrrhic Victories: Attempts to Narrativize the Unsayable of War

Lew Gleich (Maryland, English) - "Narrating the Simulacrum of War: Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Courtney Angela Brkic's Stillness"

James Hodapp (Maryland, English) - "Making the Present Livable: Positionality and the Unsayable in David Grossman's See Under: Love and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried"

Porter Olsen (Maryland, English) - "Interruption War Interpretation: Arresting Narratives in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Seiffert's The Dark Room"

Keynote -- 5:00PM
Dr. Jonathan Gil Harris, Associate Professor of English, George Washington University

Mock Turtle Reading Series -- 7:00PM
A reading by Maryland MFA students at Wonderland Ballroom in Columbia Heights, Washington, DC

Saturday - February 28th, 2009
 
Welcome -- 9:00-9:50AM

Continental breakfast and coffee

Session 3 -- 10:00-11:15AM

Panel E: Witnessing Mediation

Alexis Chema (Georgetown University, English) - "Coleridge's Epistemology of the Sickbed"

D. Seth Horton (Maryland, English) - "When We Pigs Awaken"

Jeremy Metz (Maryland, Comparative Literature) -  "When the experience of trauma is mediated by a complicit witness: Instabilities in literary witness positions and their implications for the ethical reader"

Laina Saul (George Mason University, Cultural Studies) - "Djamila Boupacha, Terrorist/Victim/Sign: Becoming Human Through Torture, Discourse and at the Boundaries of the Nation-State"

Panel F: Technology, Abolitionism, and the Nineteenth Century Body Politic

Meaghan Fritz (Georgetown University, English) - "Uncle Tom Mania and the Body Politic"

Stacy Nall (Georgetown University, English) - "A Government of Future Citizens: Race, Gender and the Child in The Anti-Slavery Alphabet"

Cheryl Spinner -(Georgetown University, English) - "Competing Electricities: Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism and the Politics of 'It'"

Sarah Workman (Georgetown University, English) - "Self-Shaping and World-Making:  Angelina Grimké Weld's Performances of Suffering"

Keynote -- 11:30AM
Dr. Zita Nunes, Associate Professor of English and Director of Comparative Literature, University of Maryland

Lunch -- 12:30-1:30PM
Join your colleagues for a catered lunch from Lebanese Taverna

Session 4 -- 1:45-3:00PM

Panel G: Poetry and (National) Identity

Lisa Kirch (Maryland, English) - "Pain and Potential within a Female Minstrel's Song; The Triumph of Voice in Matilda Betham's 'The Lay of Marie'"

Rob Wakeman (Maryland, English) - "So Little Forgetting: The Robert Burns Memorial in Albany, N.Y."

Amy Washburn (Maryland, Women's Studies) - "Representing the 'Real' IRA: The Use of 'Shout-outs' in Eavan Boland's 'A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol' and Roseleen Walsh's 'On Commedagh Hill' as a Form of Irish Republican Remembrance"

Jennifer Williams (Maryland, English) - "A Courtly Love for the Twenty-First Century: Cyrus Cassell's More Than Peace and Cypresses"