University of Oxford
Oxford English Graduate Conference
Strange Bedfellows
Search

Programme

We are excited to share the conference programme! Please note, this draft programme is subject to change, so please check back ahead of the conference itself.

 

9.00-9.20 Registration

 

9.20-9.30 Opening Remarks

 

9.30-10.30 Keynote (Lecture Theatre) - Professor Kirsten E. Shepherd

10.30-11.00 Break

11.00-12.30 Session I

Strange Bedfellows on the Page - Seminar Room 1

Chair: Rosie Hall

  • Imogen Edmundson, "'I made of my ffrend my ffoo': Discomfort and the Desire to Create in Fifteenth-Century Short Verse"
  • Chloë Olliff, "How Anthony Wood Read His Ballads: Dissimilitude, Disjunction, and Memory in Early Modern Ballad Collections"
  • Evie Sutcliffe, "Queer (Re)productive Futurism in Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack (1928) and Nightwood (1936)

Homosocial Relations - Lecture Theatre

Chair: Natalia Orenstein

  • Jesse Astley, "'The Library Annex': Queer friendship and humour in the early years of the AIDS epidemic"
  • Robin Reinders, "The T.C.B.S. and 'Allowable Distance Apart': Interdisciplinarity, Productive Tension and the Collective Origins of Tolkienian Fellowship"
  • Brian Moore, "Desert Island Aristos: Beckett, Proust, and the End of 'Le Monde'"

Bedfellows Across Time - Seminar Room 2

Chair: Jane Cooper

  • Rosie Parkes, "The Victorian Afterlives of The Decameron X.7"
  • Vida Long, "'A Useful Poet': The 'English Poets' in Maurice Gee's Plumb (1978)"
  • Nic Nicolaou, "Is There a Text in This Calendar? John Lydgate's A Kalendare and Fifteenth-Century Ideas of Literature."

 

12.30-13.30 Lunch

 

13.30-15.00 Session II

 

 

Intermedial Collaborations - Seminar Room 1

Chair: Ellie Hall

  • Victoria Maiden, "Interpretation and Intervention: Female Visual Expression in Florence Harrison's Poetic Illustrations"
  • Ava McLean, ""This Is Improbable + Sentimental": Film Adaptation and Collaboration in the Graham Swift Archive"
  • Nicole Gibbons, "Strange Theologies: A Pilgrimage through William Stukeley's Extra-Illustrated Book of Common Prayer (c. 1733)"

Productive Tensions - Seminar Room 2

Chair: Niamh Ahern

  • Seán O'Neill, "'As wife & husband': Intimacy and Mimetic Rivalry in The Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597)"
  • Oisin McManus,"Gothic and anti-Gothic Impulses in Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep"

 

Centring the Nonhuman - Lecture Theatre

Chair: Hendrikje Dorussen

  • Tatun Harrison-Turnbull, "Erotic plasticity: Prophylaxis, Prosthesis, and Containment in Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) and Scott Guild's Plastic: A Novel (2024)"
  • Caroline Drapeau, ""Her companion wherever she went": Representations of the Canine in Black Women's Fiction in Antebellum America"

 

15.00-15.30 Break

 

15.30-17.00 Session III

 

Playing with Authorship - Seminar Room 1

Chair: Lily Middelton-Mansell

  • Brody C. J. Eldridge, "The A(I)uthor: LLMs, Dead Authors, and Entanglement"
  • Annabel Marshall, "'I Remember When I Wrote The Circus': The Lyric as Genetic in Kenneth Koch's 'Circus' Poems"

 

Interdisciplinary Conversations - Lecture Theatre

Chair: Jacky Ho Lung Chan

  • Rosa Appignanesi, "The Veritable Actress: Sarah Bernhardt in the Clinic"
  • Emily Maisonville, "Free Will and Evil: Coleridge's Philosophical Polyamory and Its Progeny"
  • Nathan Walker, "Cleanth Brooks and Lancelot Andrewes"

 

17.00-17.10 Closing Remarks

 

17.10-18.00 Drinks Reception