Keynote Speakers:
J. Hillis Miller (University of California at Irvine)
Hillis Miller holds honorary degrees as Doctor of Letters from the University of Florida, Doctor of Humane Letters at Bucknell University, and Doctor Honoris Cause at the University of Zaragoza. He is also Honorary Professor of Peking University and past president of the Modern Language Association. Before coming to Irvine, Hillis Miller taught at The Johns Hopkins University and Yale University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. His research interests are in the areas of Victorian literature, modern English and American literature of the nineteenth-and twentieth-centuries, comparative literature, and literary theory. He has published many essays and reviews and is an editor of various literary journals. Among Hillis Miller’s books are Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels; The Disappearance of God; Poets of Reality; The Form of Victorian Fiction; Fiction and Repetition; The Linguistic Moment; The Ethics of Reading; Hawthorne and History; Ariadne’s Thread; Illustration; Victorian Subjects; Tropes, Parables, Performatives; Theory Now and Then; New Starts; and Topographies. Among his recent books are: Reading Narrative from Oklahoma Press, Black Holes from Stanford Press, Speech Acts in Literature, from Stanford University Press, Others, from Princeton University Press, and Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James, from Fordham University Press.
Anne-Lise François (University of California at Berkeley)
Anne-Lise François joined the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1999, after receiving her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her teaching and research focus on (mostly) 19th-century British, American and European (French and German) fiction, poetry and thought, with some excursions into the 17th, 18th, and early 20th centuries. She has taught courses on the modern period in British and American literary history, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, as well as seminars and graduate courses in the Comparative Literature Department on European “Green” Romanticism and aesthetic theory, and on the writing and epistemology of love; her current teaching focuses on the convergence of literary and environmental studies. In areas as diverse as contemporary food and farming politics and debates on climate change and the temporality of environmental violence, she continues to seek alternatives to Enlightenment models of heroic action, productive activity, and accumulation, and to identify examples of the ethos of recessive fulfillment and non-actualization theorized in Open Secrets.
Linda Hutcheon and J. Edward Chamberlin Speaker in Literary Theory:
Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto)
Rebecca Comay is Professor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Literary Studies, as well as an associate member of Jewish Studies and of the German Department. Professor Comay works at the intersection of philosophy, art, and psychoanalysis, with a special focus on post-Hegelian political philosophy (including Marx, Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School) and contemporary continental philosophy. She is interested in questions of memory, trauma, and the archive, and in particular in exploring the resources of psychoanalysis for social and cultural analysis. Current projects include a project on ruins, revolutionary erasure, and the theological-political idea of the tabula rasa; a project on hypochondria and the end of life (Kant and Proust); and a project on inheritance. Recent publications include Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford UP: 2010).