PROGRAMME

Friday April 10, 2026

1:30 Registration

2:00 Opening Remarks: Zeynep Aygün

2:30 PANEL ONE | Pleasure Deferred, Pleasure Denied

(Mod. Chanelle Dupuis)

Victoria Cheff (Brown University)

Colette Shoots a Blank: Erotic Sterility and Textual Pleasure in Les Vrilles de la vigne

Michael Greener (University of Oxford)

“I found your name on the sealing wax obliterated”: The Eighteenth-Century Epistle and Postponed Excess

Louis Aubry (ENS - currently Visiting à Harvard et NYU) Esthétique baroque et ascèse dans l’œuvre de Jean Genet

✴✴✴BREAK✴✴✴

4:00 PANEL TWO | Heterotopias From the Corner of the Eye

(Mod. Abigail Culpepper)

Marie Rault (Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Austérités coloniales et excès hétérotopiques : poétiques autochtones et diasporiques chez Joy Harjo, Flora Devatine et Vera Duarte

Niraj Raju (University of Virginia)

The Spectral Gaze of Care - Urban Human Suffering and the Non-Ethics of Ethnography

Song Huang (University of Virginia)

La vertu qui punit : austérité néolibérale et misogynie de structure dans Humus de Gaspard Koenig

✴✴✴RECEPTION✴✴✴

Saturday April 12, 2025

9:00 Breakfast

10:30 PANEL THREE | Austérités malgré tout

(Mod. Sofiya Smyej)

Mai Kheir (University of Oxford)

Overloading Language: Beckett’s Postwar Crisis of Meaning

Alejandro Morales (Brown University) Mangrove Pessimism

Miranda Ochoa (Vanderbilt University)

The Duality of the Nothing: Austerity, Repetition, and Ethical Intensity in Agnes Martin

✴✴✴BREAK✴✴✴

12:15 PANEL FOUR | “Scarce Half Made Up”

(Mod. Michele Moghrabi)

Olivia Goldring (University of Berkeley)

“Voice Without ‘I’: Indexical Rupture and Embodiment in Beckett's Not I”

Mattis Gravingen (University of Oslo)

Calibrating Individuation: Photographic Ekphrases as Modular Units in Annie Ernaux’s Les années

Diweng Mercy Dafong (University of Alabama)

Rooted Elsewhere: Burkinabè Women’s Narratives of Place, Migration, and Postcolonial Becoming

✴✴✴LUNCH✴✴✴

2:30 PANEL FIVE| The Price of Words: Translation, Debt, and Austerity

(Mod. Yiming Hu)

Manuela Palango (Université de Louvain)

Traduire l’austérité : Les vernaculaires postcoloniaux face à la norme française

Benjamin Webb (Brown University) Austerity in Translation

Alessandro Moghrabi (Brown University)

✴✴✴BREAK✴✴✴

5:00 KEYNOTE ADDRESS |

Brigitte Stepanov (Georgia Institute of Technology) (Q&A Mod. Rose Taury)

6:30 Closing Remarks: Rose Taury

✴✴✴RECEPTION✴✴✴