Keynote Speakers

	Susan Fraiman (University of Virginia) Susan Fraiman is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book, Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins (2017), explores domestic precarity and creativity among queer, working-class, immigrant, and other marginal figures. Recent articles include “Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare” (New Literary History, 2023), “Bathroom Realism and the Women of Cable TV” (Signs, 2022), and “Realism’s Gender Wars” (American Literary History, 2022). Her talk, “Recumbent Bodies in Recent Cinema: Toward a Theory of Horizontal Masculinity,” calls on recent films by Kelly Reichardt and Lukas Dhont for their uncommonly tender portrayals of male friendship. Countering images of tough manhood and upright male bodies, especially those celebrated by the Hollywood Western, both films gesture instead toward what I call horizontal masculinity.
	Aruni Kashyap (University of Georgia) Aruni Kashyap is the author of His Father’s Disease: Stories and the novel The House With a Thousand Stories. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he has also translated two novels from Assamese to English, published by Zubaan Books and Penguin Random House. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Catapult, Bitch Media, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel called Noikhon Etia Duroit, and three novellas. He is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens.
	James Krasner (University of New Hampshire) James Krasner completed his undergraduate work at Hampshire College and received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. His dissertation brought together Darwinian biology, visual perception theory, and Victorian nature writing, and became his first book The Entangled Eye (1992). His scholarship gravitated toward literature and medicine, with his second book Home Bodies (2020) focusing on embodiment in domestic space, incorporating work on phantom limb, nursing care, homelessness, and hoarding. More recently, he has been bringing together the study of embodiment with aesthetics, gender and the law.  He has also maintained a parallel focus on Victorian literature, mainly Sherlock Holmes. Professor Krasner believes that interdisciplinary study offers endless opportunities to enrich culture, address real human problems, and avoid boredom.