Renegotiating Ethics in Literature and Film

Zuzanna Ladyga is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on the intersections of ethics, aesthetics, and affect in contemporary literature. She is the author of The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Rethinking Postmodern Subjectivity: Emmanuel Levinas and the Ethics of Referentiality in the Work of Donald Barthelme (Peter Lang, 2009). 
 

Chia-Chieh Mavis Tseng is Professor and Director of the Language Center at Taipei Medical University. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research and publications explore visual culture, urban modernity, and memory studies. Her book, Memory Made, Hacked, and Outsourced: How 21st Century Anglophone Novels Remember and Forget, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023. 

Carole-Anne Tyler is Associate Professor of English at U.C. Riverside. Her research and teaching interests include literary, media, and cultural theory; gender and sexuality; film; fiction; and modernism and postmodernism. She is the author of Female Impersonation (Routledge 2003) and is at work on a book on the voice and the gaze.

Daniel Valella is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His interests include U.S. multiethnic literatures, rhetorical theory, film, and queer critique. His current book project, American Ethos: Race, Coloniality, and Literary Persuasion, examines how U.S. minority writers since 1945 have developed new forms of rhetorical ethos—the illumination of shared rituals, spiritual beliefs, locations, and ethical values—to persuade readers to help eradicate social injustices.

Rachel Ziff O’Brien is a PhD candidate in the Department of English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research considers Holocaust-themed adaptations of Grimms’ fairy tales, with particular attention to intersecting portrayals of Jewishness, gender, and disability.

Janetsa J. Keovorabouth is a postgraduate instructor in English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She teaches undergraduate writing and research courses, where she emphasizes critical inquiry, collaborative discussion, and student engagement in textual analysis. Her research interests lies at the intersection of Asian American literature and film, with particular attention to how narratives of memory, grief, silence, and adaptation shape questions of identity and belonging. 

Damilare Bello is doctoral candidate in English Department at Duke University, where his work on the connections between automatic states, embodied cognition, and ethical futures threads interdisciplinary perspectives from literature, sound studies, media theory, and cognitive science. He is co-founder of African Thought and Media Working Group and convenes the ATM Event Series at Duke University where practitioners and scholars of African media interact. 

Jein Kim is a graduate student in Department of English at Rutgers University. Her research interest covers African American literature, American literature, Black studies and critical theory. More specifically, she is interested in how 19th and 20th century novels narrativize the scenes of encounter, violence, and reparations, particularly within the context of Atlantic slavery and its gendered and sexual afterlife.

Choa Choi is a PhD Candidate in English at Brown University. She primarily works on multi-ethnic American literatures with a focus on postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and narratology. Choi is interested bringing together the narratives of U.S ethnic minority subjects and the subjects of Global South into dialogue around the question of ethics and responsibility in narrating the vexed relationship between the particularity of the individual and the universality of collectivities.