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Creature (Dis)comforts: On Human Thresholds from Classical Myth to Modern Day
Saturday, Jun 3, 2017 @ 9:30 AM - 5:30 PM
CMRS Conference
The threshold of the home constitutes a literal boundary between public and private, between the domestic and the political. It is also a border that, by its very nature, invites transgression. It is a boundary that exists to be crossed.
This conference, organized by Dr. Sara Burdorff (UCLA, English) and the student group Colloquium for Oral and Popular Tradition Studies, takes the literal liminality of the domestic threshold as its inspiration, exploring the comparable permeability of more abstract thresholds in a wide range of social, temporal, and interdisciplinary contexts.
Presentations will elaborate on the ambivalent cultural value invested in other intrinsically–even necessarily–violable boundaries between Self and Other, including those between man and man, man and animal, and parent and child.
| Saturday, June 3, 2017 | UCLA Royce Hall Room 314 | |
| 9:00 | Refreshments |
| 9:45 | Welcoming Remarks Sara Burdorff, Conference Co-organizer, UCLA Department of English |
| 10:00 | Liza Blake (University of Toronto) “Fabulous Knowledge: Animal Fables at the Threshold of Literature and Science” Session Chair: Karina A. Roche (UCLA) |
| 11:00 | Kathryn Vomero Santos (Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi) “‘Madam, my interpreter, what says she?’: Women and the Thresholds of Language in Early Modern English Drama” Session Chair: Zrinka Stahuljak (UCLA) |
| 12:00 | Lunch Break |
| 1:00 | Susan Schmidt (University of California, Santa Barbara) “The Urban Ecology of Medieval Cities: Testing Thresholds and Negotiating Boundaries” Session Chair: Ronnie Cohen (UCLA) |
| 2:00 | Robert Watson (UCLA) “Boundary Failures and Creaturely Discomforts in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus” Session Chair: Megan Lonsinger (UCLA) |
| 2:30 | Coffee Break |
| 2:45 | Mead Bowen (UCLA) “Precariously Human: Forming, Deforming, and Reforming Identity in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi” Session Chair: Kylie Rostad (UCLA) |
| 3:15 | Sarah Alison Miller (Duquesne University) “Porosity and the Medieval Maternal Breast” Session Chair: Christine Nguyen (UCLA) |
| 4:15 | Laura Lorhan (UCLA) “At the Heart of the Riddle: Riddling and Community in Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack” Session Chair: Helen Zapata (UCLA) |
| 4:45 | Round Table with Speakers Moderator: Joseph F. Nagy (Harvard University) |
| 5:30 | Closing Remarks Malcolm Harris, Colloquium for Oral and Popular Tradition Studies, Conference Co-organizer |
| Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies and the Colloquium for Oral & Popular Tradition Studies | |
| Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating. | |
Funding for this conference is provided by the Armand Hammer Endowment for the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, the Campus Programs Committee of the Program Activities Board, and the UCLA Department of English.