Please click the images below to view the full program for the conference. Please REGISTER for each event that you want to attend here: https://forms.gle/xP5uJnV83UJzZiKf6

Highlight Events

March 31, 2023

Plenary Speaker #1

Shola von Reinhold, author of LOTE (2020) and winner of the 2021 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2021 The Republic of Consciousness Prize

Decadence in Creative Writing Roundtable #1

Thuy On, author of Decadence (2022), long-listed for the The Stella Prize

Susann Cokal, author of The Kingdom of Little Wounds (2013) and other novels, Quick Bright Things (in-progress)

Moderator: Katharina Herold Zanker, Assistant Professor, Durham University, and author of The Indispensable East’: Literary Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880−1920 (under contract with Oxford UP)

April 1, 2023

Plenary Speaker

Robert Stilling, Associate Professor of English at Florida State University and winner of the 2019 Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book, Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (2018).

Decadence in Creative Writing Roundtable #2

Dustin Pearson, Assistant Professor, University of Toledo, poet of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (2022), and many others. Recipient of the Katherine C. Turner and John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Awards and a 2021 Pushcart Prize, among others.

Joyelle McSweeney, Professor, University of Notre Dame, poet of Death Styles (forthcoming), Toxicon and Arachne (2020), The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2015), and many others. Recipient of 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2021 Pushcart Prize, among many others.

Paul Cunningham, poet of Fall Garment (2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (2020), and many others. Recipient of 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize and the 2015 Sparks Prize Fellowship, among many others.

Santiago Vizcaíno, poet of Devastacíon en la tarde / Destruction in the Afternoon (2008) and Matar a mama/Matricide (2015), among others. Recipient of the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture’s National Literary Projects Prize, among many others

Kimrey Anna Batts, poet and translator from Spanish to English for Vizcaíno

Moderator: Amy Sailer, PhD Candidate, University of Utah

Futures of Decadence Studies Roundtable

Peter Bailey, Associate Professor of English, University of the Bahamas

Dennis Denisoff, McFarlin Chair of English and Film, University of Tulsa, and author of Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860-1910: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival (2022)

Jane Desmarais, Professor of English, Goldsmiths, University of London, Director of The Decadence Research Centre, Editor-in-Chief of Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, President of the British Association for Decadence Studies.

Stefano-Maria Evangelista, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Oxford University, and author of Citizens of Nowhere: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle (2021).

Kristin Mahoney, Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State University, and Co-Editor of CUSP: Late 19th and 20th Century Cultures, and author of Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family (2022).

Conference Chair

Cherrie Kwok, PhD Candidate and Elizabeth Arendall Tilney and Schuyler Merritt Tilney Jefferson Fellow, University of Virginia. Email: mk7k@virginia.edu

Vice Chairs

Joe McLaughlin, PhD Student, University of Toronto. Email: joe.mclaughlin@mail.utoronto.ca

Amy Sailer, PhD Candidate, University of Utah

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Kristin Mahoney and Michèle Mendelssohn for their help in brainstorming the format of the conference, and to Linda Winecoff for suggesting an event in the first place. Many thanks as well to Stephen Arata, Jane Desmarais, Ellis Hanson, and Ben Skipper, for their feedback and support.

Artwork

All the images on the conference poster and website are under a creative commons licence. This website uses various photographs of four artworks by Yinka Shonibare, a British-Nigerian artist: “Wind Sculpture VII” (pictured below and in the conference poster), “Prospero’s Monsters (CFP page)” “Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle,” (CFP page) and “Earth” (at the top of this page).

For more on Shonibare’s relationship to Decadence, see Robert Stilling’s chapter, “Decadence and Anti-Realism in the Art of Yinka Shonibare” in Beginning at the end: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (2018).

Global Decadence, Race, the Futures of Decadence Studies

Program & Info