Unbound, Unfinished, Ongoing: Kate Zambreno Symposium
23 October 2026, online
8:45: Opening Remarks
Organizers: Rubén Peinado Abarrio (University of Zaragoza) & Laura de la Parra Fernández (Complutense University of Madrid)
9:00-10:00: Keynote. Chair: Laura de la Parra Fernández
Chloe Green (Australian National University), “‘I see literature everywhere, a vast referentiality': Kate Zambreno’s Readerly Aesthetic”
10:00-11:30: Panel #1 Relationality and Feminist Genealogies. Chair: Arwa F. Al-Mubaddel
● Inés García (Independent Scholar), “The Discomfort with Heroines: Kate Zambreno’s Heroines and the Limits of Feminist Reading”
● Suchismita Ghoshal (Indira Gandhi National Open University), “The Self Written by Others: Consumer Affect, the Advertised Self, and the Theft of Interiority in Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl”
● Arwa F. Al-Mubaddel (King Saud University, Riyadh), “Unfinished Attachments: Kate Zambreno’s Heroines and Relational Modernism”
11:30-11:45: Coffee break
11:45-13:45: Panel #2 Form and/as Affect. Chair: Marcelo Fornari López
● Caterina Pan (University of Salzburg), “On Art and Care: Lightening the Burden of (De-)Creation in Kate Zambreno’s Drifts and The Light Room”
● Marcelo Fornari López (University of Barcelona), “‘Perhaps a Drift Is a Sort of Form’: Autotheory and the Novel in Kate Zambreno’s Drifts (2020)”
● Álvar Menéndez Cámara (Complutense University of Madrid), “Affective Imprints in Kate Zambreno’s Drifts”
● Myriam Coté (Laval University), “‘A Feeling of the Notebook’. Notes on Grief and Non-Linear Time in Zambreno’s Work”
13:45-15:00: Lunch break
15:00-16:30: Panel #3 Motherhood and Care as Creative Processes. Chair: Rubén Peinado Abarrio
● Elena Stack Martin (Trinity College Dublin), “The Politics of Writer’s Block in Kate Zambreno’s Matrifocal Narrative: Drifts”
● Marianne Lind (University of Tartu), “Relationality and Light in Kate Zambreno's The Light Room”
● Eva Pelayo Sañudo (University of Cantabria), “The Overconnected Body of the Pregnant Subject: Autotheory, Intercorporeality and Vulnerability in Kate Zambreno’s Drifts”
16:30-17:30: Workshop: Teaching Kate Zambreno.
● Rubén Peinado Abarrio (University of Zaragoza), “Introducing Autotheory with Kate Zambreno’s ‘Insekt or Large Verminous Thing’”
● Laura de la Parra Fernández (Complutense University of Madrid), “Becoming Through Reading: Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If already Dead as Feminist Life Writing”
17:30-18:00: Closing Remarks