Contributors
Ian Balfour is Professor of English at York University and a specialist in 18th-century philosophy, British Romantic literature and culture, and critical theory. His publications include Northrop Frye (1988), The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002), and essays on the Romantics (Wordsworth, Blake, Godwin, Inchbald), Walter Benjamin, and popular culture (music, TV, film). He co-edited with Atom Egoyan, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (2004), and with Eduardo Cadava, And Justice For All?: The Claims of Human Rights (a 2004 special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly). He has taught at institutions that include Cornell, Stanford, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, and Williams College.
Sarah Blackwood is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Pace University, NYC. She has published scholarly work on nineteenth-century American visual culture and literature, photography, and antebellum African American responses to photography in American Literature, Common-Place, and MELUS. She is currently working on two book manuscripts, the first on nineteenth-century American portraiture and depictions of inner life, titled The Portrait's Subject, and the second a co-edited collection of primary texts written by nineteenth-century African Americans that address the visual culture of the era. She is also co-founder and editor of the online magazine Avidly.org, and has published contemporary pop-cultural criticism in Salon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, The Hairpin, and The Awl.
Peter Breiner teaches political theory in the Department of Political Science at SUNY Albany. He is author of Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Cornell University Press) as well as articles on on the relation of political sociology to political theory focusing on Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Antonio Gramsci. He has also written on Machiavelli. More recently his work has focused on conflicts over political equality and citizenship, the debate over realism in political theory, and the relation of political theory to political ideology.
Erica Fretwell received her Ph.D. from Duke University, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her book project, entitled “Senses of Belonging: The Syn-aesthetics of Citizenship in Postbellum America,” explores the formal strategies that postbellum writers developed to ground the emotional vicissitudes of citizenship in bodily sensation. She has published two articles–the first on the imbrication of aesthetic and sensory taste in Emily Dickinson’s writings, the second on the texture of autobiography–in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and American Literary History, respectively.
Walter Johnston received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 2013, defending a dissertation entitled “The Power of Judgment: Aesthetics and Politics in Kant, Hegel, and Kleist.” He has taught courses in literature, philosophy, and art from antiquity to the present at Princeton, New York University, Barnard College, and The Cooper Union, and currently teaches at Williams College. His current research examines the tension between consensus- and dissensus-based models of political space as evidenced in twentieth- and twenty-first century aesthetic theory, political philosophy, literature, art, cinema, and protest movements.
James D. Lilley is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is author of Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity (Fordham, 2013) and editor of Cormac McCarthy: New Directions (University of New Mexico, 2002). His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in journals such as ELH, New Literary History, and The Southern Quarterly.
Wendy Roberts is Assistant Professor at University at Albany where she researches and teaches early American literature. Her book in progress, “Redeeming Verse: The Poetics of Revivalism,” argues that the far-reaching social transformations precipitated by the transatlantic evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth century depended upon the development of a major literary form: revival poetry. She is a recipient of awards from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, The American Antiquarian Society, The Huntington Library, The Newberry Library, and the Smith Reynolds Library.
Morton Schoolman is Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany specializing in modern political theory. He has published widely in critical theory and American political thought. His current book project is entitled Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image and the Emancipation of Perception, which argues that the visual image and its universalization in the cinematic media of modern democratic societies constitute a new form of enlightenment. Drawing on the work of Whitman, Adorno, Bergson, and Deleuze, this project revaluates the conception of enlightenment as a process constituted by the visual image, rather than the word, while reassessing the claims of political and social theorists who have argued that mass culture represents a decline of the normative aspirations for democracy formulated during the European Enlightenment of Western modernity.
Torrey Shanks is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, where she teaches political theory. Her research is in the area of early modern political thought, feminist theory, language and politics, and democratic theory. She has written on rhetoric and imagination in the thought of John Locke as well as on toleration, judgment, and monsters in the work of Locke and Michel de Montaigne. She continues to examine the role of the passions in materialist accounts of imagination, language, and embodiment.
Charles Shepherdson is Professor of English and Director of the Liberal Studies Program at the University at Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (Routledge) and Lacan and the Limits of Language (Fordham), and the editor of Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature, a series at SUNY Press that has produced approximately 20 volumes. He has been the Henry A. Luce Fellow at the Claremont Graduate School, the Joukowsky Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and a post-doctoral fellow at the Commonwealth Center at the University of Virginia. He has held the Aristotelian Chair in the Liberal Arts at Saint Thomas Aquinas College, and was William P. Huffington Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University of Ohio. He was National Science Council Visiting Professor at National Taiwan University, and was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in American Studies from 2006-11. Before coming to Albany, he was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Joel Sodano is a doctoral candidate in English at the University at Albany, where he teaches literature and media studies. His dissertation, entitled “Passion’s Logic: Eighteenth-Century Prose and the Problem of Modern Epistemology,” explores the consequences that emerged when eighteenth-century writers attempted to combine the concerns of formal realism with literature’s affective agenda of presenting the emotional quality of experience, arguing that literary portrayals of how modern subjects experience “the passions” contribute to and challenge a modern empiricist model of epistemology. His additional research interests include figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, and he has written on Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and Francis Hutcheson.
Anita Sokolsky is Professor of English at Williams College. She is currently writing a book on fanaticism in British literature and political philosophy of the nineteenth century, in the framework of eighteenth-century and current theoretical debates on fanaticism. She also writes on modern and contemporary poetry, and teaches nineteenth-century fiction and critical theory.
Stephen Tifft is Professor of English at Williams College, where he teaches modernist literature, film, and a variety of courses examining the intersection of aesthetic and political theory. He has written on Jarry, Eisenstein, Joyce, Synge, Renoir, Lubitsch, and others, and is currently completing Staging Public Outrage, a study of riots and censorship provoked by plays and films at moments of political crisis.
Conference Co-Organizers: Michael Amrozowicz, Richard Barney, Kate Cove, Erica Fretwell, Elaina Frulla, Mike Hill, Kir Kuiken, Yanyan Li, James Lilley, Amy Mallory-Kani, Wendy Roberts, Charles Shepherdson, and Ryan Smithson
Thanks to Randall Craig, Jennifer Greiman, and Joshua Bartlett for their support.
Website created by Amy Mallory-Kani.
Sarah Blackwood is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Pace University, NYC. She has published scholarly work on nineteenth-century American visual culture and literature, photography, and antebellum African American responses to photography in American Literature, Common-Place, and MELUS. She is currently working on two book manuscripts, the first on nineteenth-century American portraiture and depictions of inner life, titled The Portrait's Subject, and the second a co-edited collection of primary texts written by nineteenth-century African Americans that address the visual culture of the era. She is also co-founder and editor of the online magazine Avidly.org, and has published contemporary pop-cultural criticism in Salon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, The Hairpin, and The Awl.
Peter Breiner teaches political theory in the Department of Political Science at SUNY Albany. He is author of Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Cornell University Press) as well as articles on on the relation of political sociology to political theory focusing on Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Antonio Gramsci. He has also written on Machiavelli. More recently his work has focused on conflicts over political equality and citizenship, the debate over realism in political theory, and the relation of political theory to political ideology.
Erica Fretwell received her Ph.D. from Duke University, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her book project, entitled “Senses of Belonging: The Syn-aesthetics of Citizenship in Postbellum America,” explores the formal strategies that postbellum writers developed to ground the emotional vicissitudes of citizenship in bodily sensation. She has published two articles–the first on the imbrication of aesthetic and sensory taste in Emily Dickinson’s writings, the second on the texture of autobiography–in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and American Literary History, respectively.
Walter Johnston received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 2013, defending a dissertation entitled “The Power of Judgment: Aesthetics and Politics in Kant, Hegel, and Kleist.” He has taught courses in literature, philosophy, and art from antiquity to the present at Princeton, New York University, Barnard College, and The Cooper Union, and currently teaches at Williams College. His current research examines the tension between consensus- and dissensus-based models of political space as evidenced in twentieth- and twenty-first century aesthetic theory, political philosophy, literature, art, cinema, and protest movements.
James D. Lilley is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is author of Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity (Fordham, 2013) and editor of Cormac McCarthy: New Directions (University of New Mexico, 2002). His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in journals such as ELH, New Literary History, and The Southern Quarterly.
Wendy Roberts is Assistant Professor at University at Albany where she researches and teaches early American literature. Her book in progress, “Redeeming Verse: The Poetics of Revivalism,” argues that the far-reaching social transformations precipitated by the transatlantic evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth century depended upon the development of a major literary form: revival poetry. She is a recipient of awards from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, The American Antiquarian Society, The Huntington Library, The Newberry Library, and the Smith Reynolds Library.
Morton Schoolman is Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany specializing in modern political theory. He has published widely in critical theory and American political thought. His current book project is entitled Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image and the Emancipation of Perception, which argues that the visual image and its universalization in the cinematic media of modern democratic societies constitute a new form of enlightenment. Drawing on the work of Whitman, Adorno, Bergson, and Deleuze, this project revaluates the conception of enlightenment as a process constituted by the visual image, rather than the word, while reassessing the claims of political and social theorists who have argued that mass culture represents a decline of the normative aspirations for democracy formulated during the European Enlightenment of Western modernity.
Torrey Shanks is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, where she teaches political theory. Her research is in the area of early modern political thought, feminist theory, language and politics, and democratic theory. She has written on rhetoric and imagination in the thought of John Locke as well as on toleration, judgment, and monsters in the work of Locke and Michel de Montaigne. She continues to examine the role of the passions in materialist accounts of imagination, language, and embodiment.
Charles Shepherdson is Professor of English and Director of the Liberal Studies Program at the University at Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (Routledge) and Lacan and the Limits of Language (Fordham), and the editor of Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature, a series at SUNY Press that has produced approximately 20 volumes. He has been the Henry A. Luce Fellow at the Claremont Graduate School, the Joukowsky Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and a post-doctoral fellow at the Commonwealth Center at the University of Virginia. He has held the Aristotelian Chair in the Liberal Arts at Saint Thomas Aquinas College, and was William P. Huffington Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University of Ohio. He was National Science Council Visiting Professor at National Taiwan University, and was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in American Studies from 2006-11. Before coming to Albany, he was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Joel Sodano is a doctoral candidate in English at the University at Albany, where he teaches literature and media studies. His dissertation, entitled “Passion’s Logic: Eighteenth-Century Prose and the Problem of Modern Epistemology,” explores the consequences that emerged when eighteenth-century writers attempted to combine the concerns of formal realism with literature’s affective agenda of presenting the emotional quality of experience, arguing that literary portrayals of how modern subjects experience “the passions” contribute to and challenge a modern empiricist model of epistemology. His additional research interests include figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, and he has written on Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and Francis Hutcheson.
Anita Sokolsky is Professor of English at Williams College. She is currently writing a book on fanaticism in British literature and political philosophy of the nineteenth century, in the framework of eighteenth-century and current theoretical debates on fanaticism. She also writes on modern and contemporary poetry, and teaches nineteenth-century fiction and critical theory.
Stephen Tifft is Professor of English at Williams College, where he teaches modernist literature, film, and a variety of courses examining the intersection of aesthetic and political theory. He has written on Jarry, Eisenstein, Joyce, Synge, Renoir, Lubitsch, and others, and is currently completing Staging Public Outrage, a study of riots and censorship provoked by plays and films at moments of political crisis.
Conference Co-Organizers: Michael Amrozowicz, Richard Barney, Kate Cove, Erica Fretwell, Elaina Frulla, Mike Hill, Kir Kuiken, Yanyan Li, James Lilley, Amy Mallory-Kani, Wendy Roberts, Charles Shepherdson, and Ryan Smithson
Thanks to Randall Craig, Jennifer Greiman, and Joshua Bartlett for their support.
Website created by Amy Mallory-Kani.