SATURDAY, 23 APRIL
10:00-11:20 – Suffering, Violence, and Displacement
Chair: Amanda Griffiths
Elias P. Forneris, “Simone Weil and ‘Affliction’ in Wartime London (1942-1943)”
James Hua, “Displaced Populations in Ancient Greece and the
Formations of New Political Identities by the Displaced: The Case of Thebes, 335-315 BCE”
Taariq Elmahadi, “Debating the Construction of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Global Anti-Blackness and White Supremacy”
11:30-12:50 – War, Annihilation, and State Power
Chair: Vanessa Pooudomsak
Wojciech Engelking, “Annihilation and the Myth of the Earth in Carl Schmitt’s Theory on War”
Ruoyu Li, “The Myth of Non-Use: Nuclear Deterrence as a Logic of Annihilation”
Shirley Le Penne, “When the State Plays God: A Typology of Theopower in Prison”
13:00-14:20 – Gender, Race, and Creative Destruktion Chair: Ziyaad Bhorat
Naomi Abayasekara, “But What Next?: Apollonius’ Lemnian Women as a Post-Genocide Society”
Caolaín Cleary, “‘What Hath These Hands Wrought’: The Self-Annihilation of Hercules in Seneca’ s ‘Hercules Furens’.”
Kimiyo Bremer, “Prepare to Die!: Aestheticizing Annihilation in the Multigenerational Works of Black Women Artists”
14:30-15:50 – Decay, Death, and Beyond
Chair: Naomi Ellis
Marie Lecuyer, “Archipelaghost: An I mmersive Investigation into Hong
Kong’s Three Dimensional Afterlives Forms”
Stephanie Zgouridi, “‘A Little Lower than the Angels or a Little Higher than the Brutes’: Evolution, Degeneration, and Epistemic Fear in the Works of Henry Maudsley”
Troy Fielder, “Self-Annihilation: Dying Well in a Damaged Planet”
16:00-17:20 – Liberatory Annihilations
Chair: Steve Cucharo
Alex Drusda, “Expiatory Annihilation: Benjamin on Divine Violence and Undecidability”
Jessica Croteau, “From Critique to Celebration: Exploring a Selective Attentiveness to Affirmation with Friedrich Nietzsche and Walt Whitman”
Matt Harvey, “The Sensorial Sublime and the (New) Material Human Condition”

All times in PDT