5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location: Thomas Room B

Registration and Reception

Friday, October 7

9:00 am - 10:30 am 

Panel 1 Violent Subjects
Location: Granville Room
Chair: Jason Haslam (Dalhousie)

Jennifer Harris (Mount Allison U) - "The Irresolution of Dorothy West’s 'Mammy'"

Shelley Rosenblum (UBC) - "Itemizing the American Landscape: Maps and Bodies of the Civil War"  

Kelley Lewis (Dalhousie) - " Uncovering Silences: The Ideation of Violence in William Faulkner's Light in August"

Clay McNearny (Marshall U) - "Roadside Memorials and the 'Rationalization' of Violence"

Jeffrey Williams (Claremont School of Theology) - "'The Kingdom of Heaven Suffers Force': Religion and Violence in the Early American Republic"

Patrick Mason (Notre Dame) - "Violence against Religious Outsiders in the U. S. South, 1870-1900"
 

10:45 am - 12:15 pm

Panel 3 Poetic Violence
Location: Granville Room
Chair: Len Diepeveen (Dalhousie)

James Dennis Hoff (CUNY) - "'The War Against War': Wallace Stevens, William James, and the Pacifist Imagination"

David Cuthbert (U of Manitoba) - "The War Before: Sovereign Violence and American Poetry"

Adam Beardsworth (Memorial U) - "Violent Parataxis and the Abject Self: John Berryman's Dream Songs in Conformist Mid-Century America"
 

Kathryn Brown (U of Toronto) - "Imagining Wartime Resettlement: Photographic Portraits of Japanese American Engineers

Brian Beaton (U of Toronto) - "The Visual Culture of Containment: Photography, Advertising, and the Post-War Era"

Thy Phu (UWO) - "Guerilla Theatre: Black Power Imaging and the Discourse of Violence"

Thomas Carmichael (UWO) - "Fortune, Life, and The Cat from Hue: Violence, Journalism, and the Spectacle of Productivity"
 

2:00 pm - 4:00 pm 

Panel 5 Agony and Anatomy in Nathaniel Hawthorne
Location: Granville Room
Chair: David Heckerl (St. Mary's)

Vanessa Warne (U of Manitoba) - "The Pain of Cutting: Amputation, Industry, and the Body Politic in 'Ethan Brand'"

Dana Medoro (U of Mantoba) - "Probing Zenobia: Abortion and Forensic Medicine in The Blithedale Romance"

Sylvia Soderlind (Queen's) - "Branding the Body American:  Violence and Self-fashioning from The Scarlet Letter  to American Psycho" 
 

Bruce Tucker (U of Windsor) - "Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib, and the New Imperialism"

Jackson A. Niday (US Air Force Academy) - "Violence Against Terrorists as Violence Against the Constitution"
 

4:30 pm -- 6:00pm   Plenary 
Location: Sackville Room

John O'Brian (UBC)

Saturday, 8 October

9:00 am - 10:30 am

Panel 7 Corporal Punishment
Location: Granville Room
Chair: Bruce Tucker (Windsor)

Percy Walton (Carleton U) - "Violation or Salvation: Critiquing Plastic Surgery"

Steve Mills (Keele U) - "Taking the Violence out of State Violence: Medics and the Death Penalty"

Victoria Lamont (U of Waterloo) - "Cattle Branding and the Traffic in Women"

Christine Bold (U of Guelph) - "Lynch Law and the Frontier Club"

Sara Humphreys (U of Waterloo) - "The Gift: Violence, Sacrifice, and Morality in The Last of the Mohicans and Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
 

10:45 am - 12:15 pm

Panel 9 Violence in the Early Republic
Location: Granville Room
Chair: Bruce Greenfield (Dalhousie)

Rowland Hughes (U of Hertfordshire) - "Infernal Cruelty: The Rhetoric of Female Murder and Infanticide in Early American Literature"

Jason Haslam (Dalhousie) - "The Unhidden Hand: Cultural Violence and Sensational Punishments"
 

Anthony Stewart (Dalhousie) - "Lynching, Education, and the Narrator in Ralph Ellison's 'A Party Down at the Square'"

Robert W. Thurston (Miami U) - "(Re-)Presenting American Lynching: Movies that Tie the Noose"

Kristin Bergen (Duke) - "Lynching Then and Now: An American Photo Album"
 

Christopher C. Brittain  (Atlantic School of Theology) - "From Violence to the Holy:  Strauss and Adorno on the Crises of Modernity"

James Costopoulos (Vassar) - "Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the Postmodern Left"

Alexander S. Duff  (Notre Dame)  "Parricide or Immoderate Moderation:  Stanley Rosen's Critique of Leo Strauss"

Neil Robertson (King's) - "The Moderation of Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the Neo-Conservatives"
 

2:00 pm - 4:00 pm 

Panel 12 Violence in Recent American Fiction 
Location: Granville Room  
Chair: Graham Fraser (Dalhousie)

Peter Robert Brown (Mount Allison) -- "Violence and Civilization: Frontiers in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood"

Geoff Hamilton (UBC) - "From Regeneration to Repetition: The Affectless Individual in Robert Stones's A Hall of Mirrors"

Michelle Banks (UWO) - "Visualizing Violence: Paul Auster's City of Glass"

Helen Patey (Memorial U) - "American Psycho: New Notes from Underground"
 

Paul M. Babiak (Graduate Ctr. for the Study of Drama, U of Toronto) - "A Dance of Aggression: Violence in American Silent Film Comedy"

Brenda Austin-Smith (U of Manitoba) -- "Maternal Violence in Hollywood Melodrama" 

Ken Paradis (Dalhousie) -- "Violation and the 'Trans gaze' in Boy's Don't Cry" 

4:30 pm -- 6:00pm Plenary
Location: Bell Auditorium, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design

Mark Seltzer (UCLA)

7:00 Conference Dinner
Location: Deco Restaurant (for further information click here)

Sunday, 9 October

9:00 am - 10:30

Panel 14 Citizens and Soldiers
Location: NSCAD   D500
Chair: Jack Crowley (Dalhousie)

James J. Schramer (Youngstown State U) - "Authorial Response to Authorized Violence: The Myth of the Citizen Soldier in American Life and Letters"

Darren Mulloy (Wilfred Laurier U) - "'Liberty or Death': Violence and the Rhetoric of Revolution in the American Militia Movement"

Lisa Arellano (Stanford) - "Renegade Patriots: The Arizona Minutemen and the Vigilante Tradition"
 

 Jared Bland (U of Toronto) - "'Pistol Shots Ring Out in the Barroom Night': Broken Bonds and Bloody Hearts in Bob Dylan's Desire"

 Kendall Shields (U of Toronto) - "'Ride, Johnny, Ride': The Misfits Assassinate Kennedy"
 

Brunch 10:45