Imitations–of Life
Description
Life is nothing given, but what is negotiated in every text and every confrontation or conspiracy among those we call living. The scientific disciplines alleged to have mastered the secrets of life and the ability to produce or create it at will—synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, etc.—are nevertheless stymied by this inevitability. The creation of life, biotechnical artifice, is predicated on a prior act of creation, the construction of a model. Such models necessarily remain contestable; artifactual; historically, culturally, linguistically, and psychosexually overdetermined; and captured in circuits of capital.
The necessity of creating a model of creation prior to the creation itself renders every invention an imitation. This negotiation of borders, in which life-or-death decisions are made without knowing what life has been or can be, unites the most humble and overconfident life scientists with their objects of study, those beings we call living, and the parasites, viruses, symbionts, consortia, tools or techno-cultural supplements with which they reach temporary accords.
We invite papers from anyone working directly with texts from the sciences and their social, political, economic, sexual, and racial contexts, or with similar themes in literature, philosophy, and theory. We are most interested in those approaches that question the dogmatic stance typical of new materialism and the material turn, which attributes agency and invention directly to matter or life, and imagines an unmediated relationship with these entities, without the intervention of invention. We are especially interested in approaches drawing on deconstruction, French theory, critical theory, science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of biology, and other domains that the material turn has neglected or pretended to surpass—always by inventing a caricature of the past.
Proposals can address, but are not limited to, the role of mimesis and narrative construction in scientific modelling; evolutionary theory in relation to nature and culture; eugenics and the far right; racial difference, sexual difference, and class difference in scientific practice and writing; virology, epidemiology, and the co-constitution of organisms by their infections; notions of health and pathology; intellectual property and the legal and economic frameworks of science; Marxist science and critiques of neoliberalism.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Armando Mastrogiovanni teaches in the Department of English at Baruch College, CUNY. His work has appeared in Derrida Today, The Oxford Literary Review, Política común, and Poetics Today. He is also an Associate Editor at Derrida Today. Armando's research focuses on the intersection of literature, philosophy, and science around the question of "life." His book-in-progress is called The Astrobiological Turn: Theories of Life Beyond the Terrestrial Imagination.
Speaker Bio
Jonathan Basile is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, teaching with their Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, and the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info. He has one published and one forthcoming book on biodeconstruction, virology, and evolutionary theory, Virality Vitality (SUNY Press, 2025) and Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution (U of Minnesota P, Posthumanities series).
Speaker Bio
Yousuf Hashmi is a research associate in Cassandra Extavour’s lab at Harvard University’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Katarzyna Muszynska is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the University of Toronto. She is a scholar specializing in Polish literature and culture of the second half of the 19th century, and is currently completing a PhD thesis at the University of Warsaw on biopolitical discourse in turn-of-the-century Polish writings. Her research draws on biopolitics, the history of science, cultural studies, anthropology, and visual studies.
Speaker Bio
Ren Ellis Neyra, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Wesleyan University, with affiliations in African American Studies and Caribbean Studies. They are the current coordinator of the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Certificate at Wesleyan and, jointly, serve on the Center for the Humanities Board. Ren is the author of The Cry of the Senses (Duke UP, 2020) and numerous articles on poetry, theory, cinema, and music.
Speaker Bio
Emile Levesque-Jalbert is the Post-doctoral fellow in Plant Humanities at Dumbarton Oaks and Post-doctoral researcher at Concordia University. His research focuses on environmental writing in French and Francophone contemporary novels and literary arts.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Eric Flohr Reynolds received his PhD in 2025 from Emory University's department of Comparative Literature. His dissertation was titled Mimetic Masks: Reiterating Identification from Classical Aesthetics to Contemporary Media. Before his time at Emory, he received an MA in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research, and a BA in Philosophy from George Mason University. He is currently teaching philosophy and literature at Kennesaw State University and Oglethorpe University.
Speaker Bio
Nicole Liao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her interests lie at the intersection of the history of photography and film, science and technology studies, and aesthetics. She is currently a Beckman Centre research fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.
Speaker Bio
I am a PhD candidate and Cogut Institute Fellow in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where I am also receiving an M.A. in German Studies and a graduate certificate in STS. I hold B.A.s from Brown in German and Art History and an M.A. in Gender Studies from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where I was a Fulbright research scholar and lecturer. My work engages media through psychoanalysis, queer theory, and philosophies of technology, medicine and the environment.