Day One - 8th June (Thu)

11:30 - 11:50 Opening Remarks

11:50 - 13:25 Panel One: Nationalism and Ideology in Visuality

Giulia Beatrice (University of Zürich) 

Terror Comes from the Sky: Gas and Bombing over Ethiopia in Futurist Painting

Sara Vitacca (Bibliotheca Hertziana Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte)

Bodies And Nature in Fascist Visual culture 

Henriette Marsden (Humboldt-University)

Between Exemplary ‘Modernity’ and Tasteless Excess – Salviati & Co. in Berlin’s Kunstgewerbemuseum

Dorothee Wimmer (Centre for Art Market Studies, Technische Universität Berlin)

“Capitalism, Violence and Sexuality: The Ugly Sides of the Weimar Republic in artworks of the “Golden Twenties” 

Q&A

13:25 - 14:30 Lunch Break 

14:30 - 16:05 Panel Two: Otherness in Artificial History 

James McDougall (Wenzhou-Kean University) 

The Laundryman as a Global Figure of Abjection in US Cultural Nationalism

Thomas Britt (George Mason University)

Subterranean Horrors of Modern Detroit: Lost River and Barbarian

David Cruickshank (King’s College London)

‘That Great and Saving Illusion’: Joseph Conrad, Djuna Barnes, and Colonialism’s Grotesque Time

Kathleen Rawlings (University of Oxford)

“Ugly/Beautiful”: Picturing the ‘Unsightly’ in Apartheid Johannesburg 

Q&A

Day Two - 9th June (Fri)

10:00 - 11:20 Keynote Speech

Christopher Reed (Pennsylvania State University / University of Oxford)

Modernism and the Middlebrow

11:20 - 11:40 Break

11:40 - 13:15 Panel Three: Enforced Identity

Connie Sjödin (University of Oxford)

Mauvais Goût: Did Plastic Flowers Decolonise Algerian Modernist Art?

Barbora Svobodová (Institute for Czech Literature)

Censorship as a Tool for Building a Modern Industrial Enterprise and Society: The Intervention of Bata Company in Literature 

Sebastian Muehl (LMDA Institute of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture at Art Academy of Latvia) 

Modernity in the Shoebox: Universalism, Aesthetic Ideology, and Utopian Imagination

Elliot Shaw (University of Georgia)

Navigating Modernity’s Fragmented Self: the Disorientations of Leiris and Coetzee

Q&A

13:15 - 14:30 Lunch Break 

14:30 - 16:05 Panel Four: Dualities of Ugliness

Michael Hart (Lane College)

Necessary Degeneration: Serial Killers and Modernity 

Vivienne Tailor (Claremont Graduate University)

Absurdism and Cannibalism as Political Satire: dos Santos’s How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman? (1971) & Yu Hua’s “Classical Love” (1996)

Zoe Copeman (University of Maryland College Park)

Corpse Venus: The Deathly Aesthetics of Modern Pornography

Allison Leigh (University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

The Case of Eugène Delacroix: Misogyny and Modern Art

Q&A

16:05 Closing Remarks