Plenary Speakers

Thursday, October 18, 5:30 p.m.
“Remodernism, Contemporaneity: Architecture Since Spectacle”

Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney.  A critic and artist, Terry Smith is the author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America, The Architecture of Aftermath, and many other works that address architecture, modernism, and postmodernity.

Friday, October 19, 5:30 p.m.
“The Internet as Spectacle: The Digital Transformation of Literary Studies”

Dr. J. Hillis Miller Jr. is currently Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.  A leading scholar in Victorian and Modernist literature,  he is the author of more than 25 books, including Fiction and Repetition,  The Ethics of Reading, and On Derrida.   Dr. Miller’s work as a professor, critic, and theorist through tenures at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and the University of California, Irvine earned him the Modern Language Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.

Saturday, October 20, 5:30 p.m.
“From Spectacle to Performance”

Peggy Phelan is Ann O’Day Maples Professor in the Arts and a Professor of Drama and of English at Stanford University.  Dr.  Phelan’s work reflects her broad-ranging interests in contemporary theater, art, photography, literature, dance, and film.  Among her publications are Unmarked:  The Politics of Performance, anthologies such as Art and Feminism (with Helen Reckitt), and numerous articles in disciplines from architecture to video studies.  She was the Chair of New York University’s Department of Performance Studies, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow at the Getty Research Institute, and has served as President of Performance Studies International.

Featured Poet

Thursday, October 18, 3:30 p.m.

James Longenbach is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Iron Key (Norton), and of six books of literary criticism, including The Virtues of Poetry, which will be published by Graywolf next year.  His poems have appeared recently in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and he reviews contemporary poetry regularly for the Nation and the New York Times Book Review.  He has taught at Princeton University, Oxford University, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and he is currently the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester.