Join us for the annual Postgraduate Research Conference hosted by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (DLLC) at King’s College London. This year’s theme, Literatures and Cultures of Repair, brings together PGRs and early-career researchers working across languages, literatures, cultural studies, film/media, and related fields to explore repair as method, practice, and hope. The conference foregrounds "repair" as both method and as a spectrum of practices, such as improvisation, partial mending, survival, maintainable, and re-making/renewing. It raises set of shared questions across disciplines, forms, and periods: how do texts respond to damage, rupture, and loss? What kind of mending do they attempt, and what kinds of new beginnings (or closures) do they offer in the wake of harm and destruction?

Thinking with repair in this sense draws attention to acts of assembling, disrupting, and sustaining through narrative, which invites contributions that speak to current ethical, aesthetic, and political concerns, as well as those that explore systemic erasures and historical violence.

The day will feature paper panels (15-minute presentations) and a film screening of Ana by Gaël Le Cornec, with opportunities for discussion and networking across institutions and disciplines.

Agenda

9:30-10:00 - Registration

10:00-10:15 - Welcome Note

10:15-11:20 - Panel 1: The Afterlife of Aftermath: The Politics of Mourning and Loss

Ethan S Northey (Birkbeck, University of London) - “Eulogy, Nostalgia and the Reparative Folklore of Cornwall”

Fan Du (University of Edinburgh) - “River-Imaginings in Open Space: Euphrates Recollections from Al Mayādīn and Eco-Ethical Futures”

Jacob Griffiths (University of York) - “The Smychthonic Narrative of John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up”

11:20-11:30 - Break

11:30-12:35 - Panel 2: Revisiting the Past as Repair: Fiction and Archives

Annalisa Chiano (University of Bologna) - “From Colonial Aphasia to Postcolonial Narrative Repair: Italian Colonial Memory in Ennio Flaiano and Enrico Emanuelli”

Ximena Oñate-García (University of Edinburgh) - “The Active Archive: Memory Text and Haptic Reconstruction in Albertina Carri’s Los Rubios (2003)”

Fan Hu (King’s College London) - “The Historical Novel as Repair: Mediating temporal rupture in The Leopard and The Last Shogun”

12:35-13:30 - Lunch

13:30-14:35 - Panel 3: Contemporary Cultural Imaginings of Repair

Kit Neikirk (University of London) - “Ouroboros as a Narrative Construct in Contemporary Theatre”

Sarah Boira (University of Sussex) - “Towards More Reparative Beds: Anti-ableist Cultures Against the Commodification of Rest”

Natasha Hendler (King’s College London) - "Internalizing the Image in Lynch’s “Inland Empire"

14:35-14:45 - Break

14:45-16:05 - Panel 4: Repairing the Narrative Self: Experimentation and Interiority

Ramyani Kundu (University of Edinburgh) - “Portrait of the Past: The Art of Memory in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory”

Peri Mirza (University of York) - "On compromise and repair in Jo Hamya’s work"

Yishu Wu (University College London) - “Toward A Damaged Futurity and Reparation: A Cyborg Charismatic Politics in Frank Herbert’s Dune Series”

Sarah Kenchington (University of Edinburgh) - “Unrepairable Selves: War, Diasporic Identity, and the Limits of Psychological Repair in The Divine Wind”

16:05-16:15 - Comfort break

16:15-17:00 - Ana (2019) screening and Q&A with the director Gaël Le Cornec

17:00-19:00 - Concluding remarks and reception

For further queries about the conference, please contact dllc-pgr@kcl.ac.uk.