Keynote Speaker

Dr. Brigitte Stepanov is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies. Dr. Stepanov writes and teaches about how categories of being, knowledge, and aesthetic forms are stretched and blurred by violence against land and life, and in turn, how ontologies and epistemologies are shaped by violent events. Her monograph in process, Cruelty: Reading the In-Human, focuses on literary and legal understandings of cruelty and their power to shift and sway what we know as the “human.” Exploring “irregular” forms of violence and their representation in fiction and visual media from Algeria, Rwanda, and France, the book examines the relationship between martial acts and definitions of in-humanity (1940-today).