"The Demon of Melancholy: Genealogies, Modernities "April 24 and 25th 2008
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Elliott Colla, Comparative Literature Brown University >>More Info

Elliott Colla graduated from UC Berkeley in 1989 where he also completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (2000). Prof. Colla joined the Comparative Literature Department at Brown in 1999. His teaching and research focuses on modern Arabic literature and film. His favorite Rhode Island surf break is in Matunuck. Professor Colla has research interests in modern Arabic and English literature; the Arabic novel; travel literature; postcolonial theory; and literary translation.

Nathalie Etoké, French Studies, Brown University

Visiting Assistant Professor. Ph.D Northwestern University. Contemporary African cinema and fiction. African American and African feminist theories. Portrayals of gender, sexuality, identity and the struggle for transcendence in postcolonial Francophone literature. Postcolonial and diasporas studies ( France, Africa, Antilles). Author of the novel, Un amour sans papiers (1999).

Jacques Khalip, English, Brown University >>More Info

Jacques Khalip is the author of Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford University Press, forthcoming), which examines the concept of Romantic anonymity as a way of being-in-the-world that resists the Enlightenment emphasis on transparency, self-disclosure, and emotional autonomy. He has published essays in Criticism, ELH, Raritan, and Forum Italicum, and has also published numerous poetry reviews in Antipodes, The Boston Review, Jacket, and Verse. He is currently at work on three projects: a co-edited collection on theories of the image; a study on Romantic aesthetics and violence; and a monograph on queer rage.

Maurizia Natali, Art History, RISD

Maurizia Natali (Ph.D. Film Theory and Aesthetic, Paris, Sorbonne Nouvelle) teaches Film History and Theory at the Rhode Island School of Design, (Liberal Arts, Art History), Providence RI. She works on Film Aesthetics, Art History and Iconology of Film and the relationships between Film and other Arts and Media. She has published “L'Image-Paysage, Iconologie et Cinéma” (Landscape in American Movies. Iconology and Cinema), Paris, P. U.V. 1996, and more recently “The Sublime
Excess of the American Landscape. ‘Dances with Wolves’) and ‘Sunchaser’ as Healing Landscapes”, Cinemas (Univ. of Montreal, Canada), Fall 2001; "Warburg et Godard, comment (ne pas) ecrire l'histoire des images”, in the book "Cinema, art(s) plastique(s)", editors P. Taminiaux and Claude Murcia, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2004; “The Course of Empire: Sublime Landscapes in the American Cinema. From Thomas Cole to Special Effects 9/11”, in the book American Film Landscapes, University of Texas Press, Editor Martin Lefebvre (Concordia Univ., CA). She is currently working on “Gradiva, Gradivae. Psycho-iconology of multimedia ‘walking women’”, and on “Dreams on Screen, the Politics of Hybridity in Film”.

Max Pensky, Philosophy, Binghamton University >>More Info

MAX PENSKY is Professor of Philosophy. He received his PhD. from Boston College in 1989. He has been at Binghamton University since1990. His areas of research and teaching include Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Critical Theory, and Philosophy of History. His publications include Globalizing Critical Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War (co-edited with Daniel Levy and John Torpey, Verso 2005), The Actuality of Adorno (State University of New York, 1997), and several translations of Jürgen Habermas such as The Postnational Constellation (Polity, 2001), as well as numerous articles.

Christine Ross, Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University >>More Info

Christine Ross' main field of research is modern and contemporary art & theory, and electronic arts. A regular contributor to Parachute, curator of exhibitions in media arts (notably at the Art Gallery of Ontario, YYZ Artist's Outlet, Oboro Gallery, and Optica Gallery), she is the author of the books The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Images de surface: l'art vidéo reconsidéré (Artextes, 1996). Recent publications also include: "Pipilotti Rist: Images as Quasi Objects" (Paradoxa 7, 2001), "The Insufficiency of the Performative: Video art at the turn of the millennium" (Art Journal 60:1, 2001), "Vision and insufficiency…: Rosemarie Trockel's Distracted Eye" (October 96, 2001), and "Redefinitions of abjection in contemporary performances of the female body," in F. Connelly, ed. Grotesque Histories of Modern Art (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Peter Schwenger, English, Mount St. Vincent University, Halifax >>More Info

Peter Schwenger is Professor of English Emeritus at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  His most recent book is The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minnesota, 2006).  His current project is a book titled "Sleepwaking: Literature between Waking and Dreaming." 

Éric Trudel, French Studies, Bard College>>More Info

B.A., Concordia University, Montreal; M.A., French literature, McGill University; Ph.D. in French, Princeton University. Author of La Terreur à l'oeuvre. Théorie, poétique et éthique chez Jean Paulhan (Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2007). Co-edited Figures et frictions. La littérature au contact du visuel, Études Françaises, volume 42, number 2, 2006 and Accessoires. La littérature à l'épreuve du dérisoire, Nota Bene, 2003. Articles and reviews on Jean Paulhan, Remy de Gourmont, Georges Perros, Chris Marker. Eric Trudel is co-director of GLOBE Revue internationale d'études québécoises. (2002– ) Assistant Professor of French.

Rebecca Wilkin, French, Indiana University >>More Info

Rebecca Wilkin specializes in early modern French intellectual history (skepticism, neo-Stoicism, Cartesianism), usually focusing on gender. She is the author of Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France, forthcoming with Ashgate, and has published articles on Descartes in differences (“Descartes, Individualism, and the Fetal Subject”) and Representations (“Figuring the Dead Descartes”) and on Renaissance historiography in Studi francesi. She works also in early modern medical history, with articles published or submitted on “the father function” in 17th-century treatises on generation and on mechanistic accounts of birthmarks. Her next book project addresses points of overlap between rationalist and mystical thought in early modern France.

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