Judith Paltin

to be presented at the annual conference of the Joseph Conrad Society (U.K.) in June-July 2016 at U Edinburgh Napier.

Early crowd analysts assumed in the individual crowd-member a proportionate loss of rational judgment, stable emotion and self-acknowledgment of responsibility. This theoretical bias propped up a traditional understanding of crowd-membership as a relinquishment of a mythic autonomy. Conrad approached the problematic from another direction; he experimented with conceptualizing the crowd as prior to and constitutive of, the individual, as when he shows an unreliable narrator’s effort to construct Jim from outside perceptions and the residual of his social networks, or how the mass body absorbs Stevie’s death. This paper brings together recent work on mediated lives and the mass body to read a set of Conrad’s character biographies as social and collective centres of focus, and to generate some ideas about their effects.

Image:The Economist, December 17, 2011

Dublin’s crowds are strangely invisible in Ulysses and difficult to decipher in the Wake. Why so?  In this paper, I will discuss some crowd actions and related events during and around the occasion of the Easter Rising, and compare them with several samples of formal and representational experiments in “Wandering Rocks” and in FW, in order to derive a set of questions about visualizing complexity and unpredictability, –questions such as how to integrate interacting quantitative and semantic phenomena.

MSA 17, Boston MA, Nov. 2015

Panel : Locating Popular Modernisms:  Medium, Discipline, Place

Organizer: Paul Peppis

Analyzing three particularly rich—and neglected—cases of modernist encounters and exchanges with popular forms of cultural production during the first half of the twentieth century, our panel interrogates the critical categories and cultural boundaries that have for too long conditioned and limited understandings of relations between modernism and the popular.  Together, our papers chart a vital and variegated cultural field in which cultural forms and producers “high” and “low,” modern and mass mingled and mixed promiscuously and productively, generating distinctive and important artworks and cultural products at once popular and modern.

…to be presented at NAVSA 2015, Honolulu Hawaii, this July.

Picture: Alexandre Socci / Barcroft Media

UBC Department of English Faculty Research Series

Friday, March 27, 2015

3:30-4:30 pm

Buchanan Tower 599

Image source: <http://fromthevaultradio.org/home/2009/05/29/ftv-160-gay-pride-month-christopher-isherwood/>. 29 January 2014

MLA Session  156 (this talk to replace Charne Lavery’s “Looking Back in Victory: ‘Native Life,’ the Threat of Witness, and Narrative Perspectivism”)

Thursday, January 8, 2015, 7-8:15 p.m.

Vancouver Convention Centre, Room West 204

Panel arranged by

The Joseph Conrad Society of America

http://www.2015victorypanel.com/index.html

Image: Beauford Delaney, Can Fire in the Park (oil on canvas, 1946), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1989.23

…at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture after 1900, University of Louisville, February 26-28, 2015.

I’m very happy to become a part of the UBC Positive Space campaign as one of the many resource persons on the Point Grey campus. Here is a description of the campaign’s objectives as copied from the Equity and Inclusion Office website:

Objectives of the Positive Space Campaign

To challenge patterns of silence around LGBQTTI issues and persons to help create a more visibly welcoming, safer and non-exclusionary campus community for all.
To affirm and show commitment for the idea that UBC is enriched and enlivened by the diversity of its community, including LGBQTTI persons.
To increase the visibility of, and contribute to the development of, positive, supportive people and spaces for LGBQTTI students, staff and faculty at UBC.
To increase awareness, affirmation and education around sexual and gender identity and diversity issues.
To provide a community of resource persons who are knowledgeable about gender identity and sexual orientation issues and resources and willing to support their lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender and two-spirited colleagues, classmates and community members.
To provide on-going educational sessions and professional development training for the campus community on issues related to sexual and gender diversity.

Beautiful Green College at the western edge of UBC-Point Grey

I’m excited to be joining the first cohort in Green College’s new Leading Scholars Program, 2014-2016. Together with the College’s affiliated and visiting faculty, postdocs and graduate students, highly talented colleagues from many disciplines across the campus and beyond, we will participate in talks and events, dinners and unexpected creative moments, as we carry out the College’s motto: “Ideas and Friendship.”