Conference Schedule

March 9–11, 2017

Robert A. Jones ’59 House Conference Room

 

Thursday, March 9

4:30–6:00 p.m.

Welcome:  Tamar Mayer, Middlebury College

Session I: Writing System in Deep Time

• Learning to Write in the West
  
  Stephanie Frampton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• A Spectrum of Literacy: Writing and the ancient Maya
  
  James Fitzsimmons, Middlebury College
  
   

Faculty Moderator: Roman Graf, German Department

6:15 p.m. Dinner served in the RAJ House Conference Room

7:00–8:30 p.m.

Session II: Shifting Genealogies of Sacred Languages

• Hebrew Language and Inquisition Censorship: The crisis of post-Tridentine Spanish humanism
  
  Francisco Javier Perea Siller, University of Córdoba, Spain
• Neo-Aramaic Enriched Biblical Narratives
  
  Oz Aloni, Middlebury College
• There’s an App for That: The democratization of texts and Qur’anic healing in Morocco
  
  James Riggan, Florida State University
  
   

Faculty Moderator: Vardit Ringvald, Middlebury School of Hebrew



Friday, March 10

12:15 p.m.  Lunch served in the RAJ House Conference Room

12:15–2:00 p.m.

SESSION III:  Orality, Literacy, New Media

• “My Knowledge Is Only from Books”: Textuality, orality, and literacy of women Sanskritists in postcolonial India
  
  Laurie Patton, Middlebury College
• Reifu Talismans in Japan: From secret transmission to commonplace symbol
  
  Laura Miller, University of Missouri—St. Louis
• Poetry as Equipment for Living: Imagining Navajo on the page and on the Internet 
  
  Anthony Webster, University of Texas at Austin

Faculty Moderator: Timothy Billings, English and American Literatures Department

2:30–4:00 p.m. 

SESSION IV:  Technologies of Writing and Imaginations of Community

• Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics: Lessons from Tamil Books in French India and French Guiana
  
  Sonia Das, New York University
• From Cultural Periphery to Cultural Capital: Ili and the making of modern Uyghur culture
  
  Joshua Freeman, Harvard University
• Sign Language Mediated by Digital Technology as a Link to Build Cultural Identities
  
  Ana Gediel, Federal University of Viços, Brazil (with Molly Bloom, University of California, Los Angeles)

Faculty Moderator: William Poulin-Deltour, Lois ‘51 and J. Harvey Watson Department of French and Francophone Studies

4:30–5:45 p.m.

SESSION V:  Medium, Mode, and the Work of Interpretation

• Creating Identity through Writing: A Case of ancient Greek vase inscriptions
  
  Małgorzata Zadka, University of Wroclaw, Poland
• Indexicals and Interdiscursivities
  
  Bruce Mannheim, University of Michigan

Faculty Moderator: Shawna Shapiro, Linguistics Program

Saturday, March 11

9:15–11:00 a.m.

SESSION VI:  Writing and Mobile Identities

• How to Write Chatino Right, Right Now
  
  Hilaria Cruz, University of Kentucky
• From Indigenous to Catalan (Is It Possible?):  Shifting paradigms of identity in the Spanish postcolonial context
  
  Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla, University Autonoma of Madrid, Spain
• Theatre of Rebellion: Danny Yung and political Hong Kong theater
  
  Wah Guan Lim, Bard College
• Animal Writing in Tawada Yōko’s The Snow Apprentice
  
  Doug Slaymaker, University of Kentucky

Faculty Moderator: Tom Moran, Greenberg-Starr Department of Chinese Language and Literature

11:15 a.m.–1:30 p.m.  Summary and Lunch