Heroes, Rebels and Outlaws: Escapism and 19thC Literature

International Seminar
1st & 4th Sunday (July,August,September 2021)

Course Facilitator: Olga Akroyd , Ph.D 

Although academia’s interest in disability studies emerged in the late 1980s, an ever-growing body of research has emerged since then, mainly from Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries.

Laverne Cox’s debut role in Orange Is The New Black seemed to usher in a new era for trans representation. In 2014, TIME decreed that the “Trans Tipping Point” had arrived and heralded a path to trans acceptance through visibility on the screen. Yet this increase in visibility has not formed an antidote to rampant transphobia. In 2021, thirty-three states have introduced 117 bills to limit and curtail the rights of trans people across the United States. Public incidents of transphobia are on the rise. In this panel, we consider the effects of hypervisibility in a time of public transphobia across media, and critically consider what the task of representation entails.

Contact|Touch

Plenary Speakers:

Hussein Fancy, Department of History, Yale University

Elina Gertsman, Department of Art and Art History, Case Western Reserve University

Resilience During the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

This panel will explore the many existing and potential connections between video games and the literary world. Many leading games have explicitly referred to works of literature, either within their storyworlds or in their marketing (for instance, Bioshock’s interactive rebuttal of Ayn Rand’s ideas). More broadly, emerging video game theory has often defined itself either by analogy or by opposition to existing concepts from literary theory. Book genres such as the choose-your-own adventure format (eg. Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series) have also anticipated video gaming, and in turn been remastered as games using the same text and narrative structure.

NeMLA's 53rd Convention will be held in Baltimore, MD between March 10-13, 2022. More information here: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html