Why All the Fuss about the Body?

“Why All the Fuss
about the Body?”
An Interdisciplinary Conference on
Local and Global/ized Bodies
The University of the South
April 11–16, 2016
CONFERENCE PROGRAM
Jessica Wohl. Finger Face, collage, 2014.
Jessica Wohl. Bend and Snap collage, 2014.
“Why All the Fuss about the Body?”:
An Interdisciplinary Conference on
Local and Global/ized Bodies
The University of the South, April 11–16, 2016
PROGRAM
Monday, April 11
4:30 p.m., Gailor Auditorium
Keynote lectures
“‘The American Walk’: Global Contact, Gesture, Rhythm, and Poetry”
by Dr. Haun Saussy (University of Chicago, Comparative Literature
and East Asian Languages and Civilizations)
“Horror Old and New: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998) between J-Horror
and Hibakusha Cinema” by Dr. Olga V. Solovieva (University of
Chicago, Comparative Literature)
Thursday, April 14
4:30 p.m., Gailor Auditorium
Keynote lecture
“The Mortal Body: Russian and American Ways of (Not) Knowing”
by Dr. Jehanne M Gheith (Duke University, Slavic and Eurasian
Studies, Women’s Studies, and Education)
Friday and Saturday, April 15–16
Twenty-eight faculty and student conference presentations
(EQB Building)
Noon–1 p.m., Lunch for conference participants at the EQB Building
1–1:15 p.m. Welcome by Dean Terry Papillon and the conference
organizers: Justyna Beinek, Sara Nimis, Mark Preslar, Steve
Raulston, Donald Rung, and Kelly Whitmer, EQB
FRIDAY, APRIL 15
ALL PRESENTATIONS ON APRIL 15–16 TAKE PLACE AT
THE EQB BUILDING
1:15–2:45 p.m. Panel 1: DISCIPLINING BODIES
Moderators: Dharitri Bhattacharjee and Scott Wilson
Kelly Whitmer, “Youthful Bodies and Sentimental Culture in Early
Modern (Central) Europe”
Sara Nimis, “Incorporation in a Sufi Milieu: Apprenticeship and Ritual
in the Trade Associations of Early Modern Egypt”
Emmanuel Asiedu-Acquah, “‘We Need Educated and Honest Youth’:
Youthful Bodies, Discipline, and Resistance in Post-independence
Ghana”
Michael Wairungu, “Uniformity vs. Swag: Styling the Body as Protest
among High School Students in Kenya”
2:45–3 p.m. Coffee break
3–4:15 p.m. Panel 2: BODY, SEX, GENDER
Moderators: Derek Ettensohn and Arturo Marquez-Gomez
Liesl Allingham, “The (In)Visible Body”
Brandon Kemp, “Vulnerable Bodies: Ethical and Erotic Investment in
Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone”
Kathryn Mills, “The Body: Sacred or Profane?”
4:15–4:30 p.m. Coffee break
4:30–5:45 p.m. Panel 3: RACIALIZED BODIES
Moderators: Melody Crowder-Meyer and Roger Levine
Russell Fielding and Matthew Mitchell, “Telling the Half:
Slaves, Slavery, and Place in North America and the Caribbean”
Adam Dahl, “Black Disembodiment in the Age of Ferguson”
Tam Parker, “Ferguson and After: Profaned and Sacralized Black
Bodies and the Contestation of the American Social Imaginary”
Jessica Wohl. Thing of Pearls, collage, 2014.
SATURDAY, APRIL 16
9–10:45 a.m. Panel 4: REPRODUCING BODIES
Moderators: Yuliya Ladygina and Alyssa Summers
Brandon Moore, “Human Sex Ratios and Environmental Factors: A
Skewed Roll of the Dice?”
Elizabeth Skomp, “Dismantling the Ideal Soviet Body: Ludmila
Ulitskaya and Corporeality”
Cat Clark, “Juno Reads Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life: Unruly Women,
Grotesque Bodies, and the Controlling Nature of the Patriarchy”
Rachel Head, “Representations of Motherhood in the Soviet Union:
Gladkov’s Cement (1925) and Baranskaya’s A Week Like Any
Other (1969)”
Pippa Browne, “Function and Fetish: Comments on Breastfeeding”
10:45–11 a.m. Coffee break
11 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Panel 5: THE BODY IN ILLNESS
AND IN HEALTH
Moderators: Laura Attanasio and Elise Kikis
Alyssa Summers, “The Immune System: Friend or Foe?”
Amy S. Patterson, “Engaging Therapeutic Citizenship and Clientship:
Untangling the Reasons for Therapeutic Pacifism among People
Living with HIV in Urban Zambia”
Phoebe Kajubi, “Tensions in Communication between Children on
Antiretroviral Therapy and Their Caregivers: An Exploratory Study in
Jinja District, Uganda”
Amelia Gray, “Redefining Physical Therapy: Extending Healing
beyond the Physical Body”
12:30–1:45 p.m. Lunch for conference participants at McClurg Dining Hall,
Room 206
1:45–3 p.m. Panel 6: PERFORMING BODIES
Moderators: Betsy Sandlin and Jeffrey Thompson
Courtney World, “Challenging the ‘Ballet Body’ with Somatic
Dance Practices”
Toby Hickson, “The Unequal Struggle for Equality: Body as
Performance in Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Blanc”
Justyna Beinek, “Cecylia Malik: Embodiment, Eco-art, Ephemerality”
3–3:15 p.m. Coffee break
3:15–4:30 p.m. Panel 7: BODIES/MACHINES
Moderators: Maggie Fritz-Morkin and Shelley MacLaren
Bill Engel, “The Early Modern Corporal Imaginary and Memory
Machines”
Mark Preslar, “Our Changing Body—Our Evolving Self”
Don Rung, “Reconstruction/Reincarnation: Navigating the
Posthuman World of Charles Stross’s Accelerando”
4:30–4:45 p.m. Coffee break
4:45–6 p.m. Panel 8: THE DEAD BODY
Moderators: Aymeric Glacet and Steve Raulston
Shana Minkin, “French Imperial Bodies in Late 19th-century
Alexandria, Egypt”
Nicholas Roberts, “The Politics and Geopolitics of Burial in
Jerusalem: Understanding the Mamilla Cemetery Controversy and
Muhammad Ali’s Interment in British Palestine”
Derek Ettensohn, “‘City of Death’: The Corpse and Catastrophe in
Nuruddin Farah’s Fiction”
ACCOMPANYING EVENTS IN APRIL 2016
April 5: Cheri Magid’s play The Gaba Girl, read by professional actors,
7:30 p.m., Black Box Theater at the Tennessee Williams Center. Cheri
Magid is the 2015–16 Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at
Sewanee.
April 6: Guest lecture: “The Animality of Affect: Religion, Emotion,
and Power” by Dr. Donovan Schaefer (University of Oxford, Science
and Religion), 5 p.m., Gailor Auditorium
April 8–10: Function and Fetish: Comments on Breastfeeding—an
exhibition of paintings by Pippa Browne. Opening: April 8, 5:30 p.m.
Exhibition open April 9–10: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Greenspace Art Collective
(a green building behind Woody’s Bike Shop)
“About The Body”: A World Film Series (3 final screenings, SUT):
• April 12, Yesterday (dir. Darrell Roodt, 2004, South Africa),
moderator: Dr. Amy Patterson
• April 19, The Skin I Live In (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2011, Spain),
moderator: Dr. Arturo Marquez-Gomez
• April 25, Son of Saul (dir. László Nemes, 2015, Hungary),
moderator: Dr. Justyna Beinek
All events are free, open to the public, and have received generous
support from the Dean of the College, Mellon Globalization Forum,
University Lectures Committee, the departments and programs
of Art and Art History, Asian Studies, English, Film, French, German,
History, Humanities, International and Global Studies, Italian, Politics,
Religious Studies, Russian, Spanish, Women’s and Gender Studies,
as well as Sewanee Union Theater, Sewanee Writers’ Conference,
Tennessee Williams Center, and Greenspace Art Collective.
All images courtesy of Jessica Wohl.