NEXUS Interdisciplinary Conference 2024
This year’s conference will be held in a hybrid schedule of in-person and online. *Panel assignments, time slots, and locations as listed below are tentative and subject to change. Please check your email for specifics, or reach out to Nexus2024UTK@gmail.com with questions or corrections.*
Friday, April 5 – Addison’s Bookstore
Simultaneous with the following events, there will be art on display. The featured artist, Meg Dunavant, contributed the artwork that is the conference’s thematic image.
7:00-8:00 p.m.
Keynote Address and Opening Remarks
Moderated by Maggie Warren
Aruni Kashyap, University of Georgia
The Way You Want to be Loved: A Reading and Conversation
8:00-9:00 p.m.
Chiasmus & Open Mic
Moderated by Lexi McDonald
Sandra Dolores Gomez-Amador
Poetry
Temi Ariyo
Fiction
Saturday, April 6 – Student Union Building
*denotes a creative writing panel
9-10:15am
Questions of Visibility – SU 260
Moderated by Kate Wright
Kaitlyn Alford, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Disclosure & Exposure: Exploring the Tensions of Queer(crip) Silence
Noah Blacker, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Merleau-Ponty and Fatness; or How to Philosophize with a Body
Jules Quinto, York University (Toronto, ON)
Trans Architectures of Being
Negotiating “Home”* – SU 270
Moderated by Emi Wood Scully
Kristen LeFevers, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Love Letters to the Jewel City
Mariam Mohammed, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Influence of Intersectionality on Creative Works
Katherine Cheung, New York University
Introduced Species
10:30-11:45am
Embracing Embodied Difference: Professionalization Strategies for Creating Alt-Ac Opportunities – SU 270
Moderated by Maggie Warren
Kelly Sauskojus, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Amber Kent-Johnson, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Creative Responses to Lived Complexities* – SU 260
Moderated by Noah Blacker
Dominique Snedeker, East Tennessee State University
Homebody, Crisis in the Cold
Ayesha Ahmed, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
The Rhetorics of the Hijab: Fashioning an Identity for Muslim Women
Amy Barnes
The Imperfect Home
12:00-1:00 p.m.
Break for Lunch
1:15-2:30pm
Poetics & Identity – SU 260
Moderated by Noah Blacker
Kimberly Blake, Arizona State University
Topopoetics in Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper: Presenting Dakhota Identity Through Place and Body
Anna Walters, Texas Tech University
Home/Bodies: Poetry for Resistance and Resilience
Yang Xiaobin, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica (Taiwan)
Cultural Identity as a Floating Signifier: Chinese Poetry in Diaspora
Artistic Approaches to Place – SU 270
Moderated by Emi Wood Scully
Greg Gillespie, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Writing into the Third Place
Mariam Mohammed, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Pushing Boundaries, Negotiating and Settling in New Spaces
Ashley Dailey, University of Southern California
Behind the Lens: Chantal Akerman’s Representations of Daughterhood and Artistic Isolation
2:45-4:00pm
Exploring the Homeland: An Approach to Writing as Immigrants in America* – SU 270
Moderated by Greg Gillespie
Shlagha Borah, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Temi Ariyo, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Sandra Dolores Gomez-Amador, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
4:15-5:30 p.m.
Keynote Address – Lindsay Auditorium, Hodges Library
Moderated by Emi Wood Scully
Susan Fraiman, University of Virginia
Recumbent Bodies in Recent Cinema: Toward a Theory of Horizontal Masculinity
7:00 p.m.
Social Hour at HiWire Brewing.
Please join us for a casual get-together at a local brewery in South Knox. There is seating both indoors and outdoors. Food or drinks will not be provided, but you can purchase them while there.
Sunday, April 7 – Online Panels & Presentations
*denotes a creative writing panel
Each panel title is linked to its appropriate Zoom room; to enter the panel, you can simply click on its title below. However, each room is secured behind a passcode, so if you wish to join the panel, please email Nexus2024UTK@gmail.com for the passcode.
9:00-10:15am
Domestic Environments
Moderated by Emi Wood Scully
Rachna Pandey, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology
Women’s Space Inside and Outside Home: Uncovering Politics of Care
Rabia Erdem, Social Sciences University of Ankara
Dirty Bodies of Dirty Houses: A Class Distinction Problem in Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women
A S Abdullah, East West University, Bangladesh
(Re)writing Myths and Subverting Gendered and Racial Superiority in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God
Home/Body Spaces*
Moderated by Kate Wright
Todd Osborne, Independent Presenter
Poems from Gatherer
Gene Gazelka, North Hennepin Community College
from Tender One
Julia Kooi Talen, University of Missouri-Columbia
Mother Rind: Ecopoetic Practices to Expand our Creative Writing
Catherine Garbinsky, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Home Sick: Poetry & Chronic Illness
Reinterpretations of Home
Moderated by Maggie Warren
Simon Hill, University of Bristol Business School
At Home Grappling with Space-Time
Marietta Kosma, University of Oxford at Lady Margaret Hall
Home in Shailja Patel’s Migritude
Erik Brownrigg, York University (Toronto, Canada)
Bachelard’s primacy of the object: Utopias of reading – Inhabiting through poetry
Yuliia Kabina, University of Georgia
Finding a Way Home with guma’ by Craig Santos Perez
10:30-11:45am
Revising Domestic Space
Moderated by Greg Gillespie
Anil Pradhan, Jadavpur University
Queer Loves, Queer Homes
Nikita Prokhorov, University of California, Irvine
Living Spaces: Reimaging Environments of Desire
Audrey T. Heffers, Illinois State University
Dualities of Safety & Terror in Queer Fiction
Creative Mergers*
Moderated by Maggie Warren
Anthony Brown, Wayne State University
The Gulf
Elisavet Makridis, Cornell University
X-change, X-ile, X-istence: Erasure as Ancestral Variable & Communion
JoAnna Novak, Independent Presenter
DOMESTIREXIA
Personal Geographies of Home
Moderated by Kate Wright
Hongliang Zhou, Changsha University of Science and Technology
Evicted from Xiangtu: The Nostalgias and Utopian Homes of Villagers in Chinese Documentaries
Aditi Basu, Independent Researcher
Feeling Home Overseas: The Indian “Belongingness” with Special Reference to Its Festivals
12:00-1:00 p.m.
Break for Lunch
1:15-2:30pm
Normalized Embodiments
Moderated by Kate Wright
Allison Harl, Ferrum College
Embodied Homelands in Cormac McCarthy’s Frontier
Paromita Patranobish, Mount Carmel College
Monstrous Embodiments and Spatial Subversions in Contemporary Graphic Autopathographies
Kaye Hare & Rosie David, University Canada West
Embodying Norm-ability
Cecilia Heil, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Set in Stone? The Exclusion of Non-Normative Bodies and Alternatives of Inclusive Design
Queer Phenomenology
Moderated by Hannah Trammell
Ren Challacombe, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario
Community Choirs as Sites of Gender Euphoria for Trans+ Singers
Yishi Pan, University of Leeds
“What Kind of life can we have in this room? —this filthy little room”
Valery Goutorova, University of St Andrews, Scotland
Queer Domesticity in Virginia Woolf’s Early Journal
2:45-4:00 pm
Erasure, Liminality, and Belonging
Moderated by Emi Wood Scully
Roma Lucarelli, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Home: A Strange Loop of Becoming in the Anthropocene
Harsha Singh, Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University
Liminal Spaces: Queering the Accessibility of Delhi Metro’ to ‘Auto Historia- Public Spaces as an extension of Home’
TALAT, National Institute of Technology, India
Bodies in Resistance: A Foucauldian Analysis of Bama’s Sangati and Karukku
Systems of Control & Imprisonment
Moderated by Maggie Warren
Steffen Wöll, Leipzig University
The Ocean at Home: Philip Henry Gosse and the Victorian Aquarium Frenzy
Nidanur Yıldırım, Social Sciences University of Ankara
Disrupting the Patriarchal Playhouse: Angela Carter’s Destructive Bodies and Distorted Houses
Amber Walters-Molina, University of North Texas
Monsters at Home
Hannah Trammell, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Fairy Tale Feelings, Forms, and Female Bodies in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber
4:15-5:30 p.m.
Keynote Address
Moderated by Emi Wood Scully
James Krasner, University of New Hampshire
Itinerant Scholarship: The Joys and Sorrows of Disciplinary Homelessness