UnReal/Real
Description
How does literature negotiate the relationship between the real and the unreal in the context of genocide, state violence, and collective trauma? Literature has long wrestled with the limits of representation, the inadequacy of language to bear witness, and the urgency of expressing the inexpressible. From mythic frameworks that attempt to give shape to historical catastrophe, to surreal and speculative modes that reveal the uncanny logic of destruction, writers have turned to the unreal—not only to escape reality, but also to account for it and confront it.
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Speaker Bio
Sophia Scime is a senior at Denison University pursuing a double major in International Studies and German. She has advanced German proficiency and significant international experience, having spent a pre-college year in Lüneburg as a CBYX ambassador and a semester studying at LMU Munich through JYM. Her current research explores how authoritarian regimes use rhetoric around motherhood to shape political and cultural norms, drawing on her interests in language, gender, and state power.
Speaker Bio
Shaanze Haroon is a senior undergraduate student from Rice University, majoring in Mathematics and English. Within English Literature, her focus is on Global Anglophone Literature, Marxist Theory, and Postcolonial Theory. Her research primarily examines the intersection of capitalism and colonialism, and its aftermath in the contemporary postcolonial world.
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Yousef Alafghani is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in English Language and Literature at the American University of Sharjah. His interests primarily lie in critical theory, colonial/post-colonial literature, Shakespeare, and modernism and post-modernism.
Speaker Bio
Grace Ellison is a fourth-year Comparative Literature major at Reed College. Her focus is on Spanish and Latin American Literature. She is from London, England. She spent the fall of 2024 studying abroad in Madrid, Spain, through Middlebury College's exchange program. She is currently working on her thesis, which examines the afterlives of Federico García Lorca and Eva Perón through a theoretical framework of translation.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Undergraduate student of Princeton University, prospective East Asian Studies major. Interested in examining gender and cultural representation in East Asian literature and films, especially historical drama. Previous research focused on the political trauma endured by elite women in Chinese history and its re-imagination in TV shows.
Speaker Bio
Jenykha Sangha is in the final year of her undergraduate degree in English Literature and Asian Areas Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is interested in literatures from South and West Asia and their diasporas.
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Emma Culley (they/she) is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill double majoring in Women's & Gender Studies and Communication Studies with a concentration in Media Arts, Performance, and Critical Practice, and minoring in History. Their work centers curiosity and an investment in queer abolition and creative expression. They serve as President of UNC's Sexuality and Gender Alliance and as an executive member of the Campus Y, UNC's hub for social justice. They'd like to thank Dr. Michelle Robinson.
Speaker Bio
Yiyao Sun is a senior undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. Her research explores modern East Asian fiction and film. She applies theories of multi-species, the avant-garde, and female embodiment to examine liminal spaces between nature and the supernatural in Chinese history. She is particularly interested in how narratives and perspectives shape the boundaries between fact and fiction, history and memory, especially in works addressing traumas under social turmoils.