PLEASE FOLLOW THE PANEL LINKS IN THE PROGRAMME BELOW TO LISTEN TO THE PRE-RECORDED PRESENTATIONS.

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Thursday 2 September

11.00 Welcome, opening remarks

11.15 Plenary 1: "Contemporary Conversations" Panel Discussion (Chair: Phil Leonard, Nottingham Trent University)

• Emily Hogg (University of Southern Denmark) - Emily can no longer attend in person but you can download her slides here.
• Peggy Hughes (Programme Director City of Literature Festival)
• Julia Bell (Writer and Academic, Birkbeck University of London)
• Laura Waddell (Tramp Press)

12.15 Parallel Panels A

A1 Cultural Modes of Contemporary Community (Chair: Niklas Cyril Fischer, University of Fribourg)

• Sadek Kessous (University of Edinburgh): “Modern Fiction and The Corporate Totality”
• Christine Okoth (University of Warwick): “Managed Mobility and the Racial Confines of Aesthetic Forms”
• Oisin Meenan (University of Zurich): “Beyond the Groves of Academe: The Campus Novel in the Age of Precarity”

A2 Serial Forms in Television and Literature (Chair: Julia Ditter, Northumbria University)

• Susanne Köller (University of Konstanz): “'Might be the War’: Ambiguity and Parapraxis in Peaky Blinders’ Serial Renegotiation of Trauma”
• Melissa Schuh (Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel): “'What we want is repetition’ – Serial Aesthetics and Brexit in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet”

13.00 Lunch break

13.45 Parallel Panels B

B1 Futures and Pasts: Ghosts, Traumas and Speculations (Chair: Chloe Ashbridge, University of Nottingham)

• Olga Dzhumaylo (Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don): “Representations of post-memory in Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home (2011)”
• Anna Johnson (Kingston University): “Failure: The Ghost and the Mother”
• Christopher Griffin (University of Brighton): “Safeguarding the Seeds of Truth: Colonial Speculation in Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed Series”
• George Kowalik (King’s College, London): “'New year, new data’: Percival Everett’s Telephone, Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, and the Future of the ‘Affective Turn’”

B2 Experiments: Language, Music, Text (Chair: Caroline Wintersgill, UCL)

• Katie Harling-Lee (Durham University): “The Transgressive Terror of Music in Orfeo (Powers, 2014)”
• Katrin Becker (University of Siegen): “'… just sparks, tiny parts of a bigger constellation’: Reading Kate Tempest’s Let Them Eat Chaos in Light of the Lukácsian-Brechtian Realism Debate”
• Rob Gallagher (University of East Anglia): “Personhood and Platformisation: The Case of Seraphine”
• Iain Spillman (Nottingham Trent University): “Postcards and Cigar Boxes: The Fictional Freud in Robert Seethaler’s The Tobacconist”

14.30 Refreshment break

14.45 Parallel Panels C

C1 States and Genres of Utopia and Dystopia (Chair: Diletta De Cristofaro, Northumbria University/Politecnico di Milano)

• Ankit Raj ( Government College Gharaunda, Karnal/Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee): “Sermons on Joint: Bob Marley, Bokonon and the Religio-lyrical Affair with State Apparatuses”
• Sam Weselowski (University of Warwick): “'At least we both know how shitty the world is’: Jack Spicer and the Colonization of Everyday Life”
• Jade Hinchliffe (University of Hull): “Reproductive Surveillance Practices in Contemporary Feminist Dystopian Fiction”

C2 Literary Value(s), Empathy and Community (Chair: Zoe Bulaitis, University of Birmingham)

• Joseph Anderton (Birmingham City University): “'Poor thing’: Homeless Animals and their Stories”
• Ben Davies (University of Portsmouth): “Reading Summer in Summer 2020”
• Katie Mulhearn (Loughborough University): “‘If only, we say to ourselves, we’d known.’: Navigating the collective in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011)”

15.30 Refreshment break

15.45 Parallel Panels D

D1 Intersections: Contemporary Fiction and Globality (Chair: Chris Griffin, University of Brighton)

• James Peacock (Keele University): “Science Fiction and Gentrification in Seth Fried’s The Municipalists”
• Chloe Ashbridge (University of Nottingham): “Class and the English Millennial Novel: Place, Precarity and Bodily Affect”
• Ryan Trimm (University of Rhode Island): “'Speculation . . . Money, blood and light’: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder as Financial Fiction”
• Demi Wilton (Loughborough University): “‘Our Path From the Land’: Environmental Displacement and Anthropocenic Futures in Contemporary Chinese Fiction”

D2 Literary Digitalities, Technologies and Gaming (Chair: Vicki Williams, University of Birmingham)

• Leon Ramsey: “Never-Not-On: ‘Digital Boredom’ in Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013)”
• Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck): “Why is Whitespace White?”
• Richard Bingham: “Engine Interpretation: Reading Time in Zelda64”
• Holly Parker (University of Lincoln): “Affect, Minecraft and (Neoliberal) Techno-Utopianism in Keith Stuart’s A Boy Made of Blocks”
• Doug Stark (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill): “'What Else to Do but Practice?’ The Pleasures and Politics of Digital Skill in David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld”

16.30 Refreshment break

16.45 – 17.15 Plenary 2: Briefing on Alluvium, C21 and BACLS online seminar series plans; closing remarks

17.15 Virtual drinks social session

Friday 3 September

9.30 BACLS AGM

10.30 Plenary 3: Round table discussion, “The Future of REF and the Implication for Literary Studies” (Chair: Caroline Wintersgill, UCL)

• Dominic Dean (Sussex)
• Kate Houlden (Brunel)
• Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck)
• Sebastian Groes (Wolverhampton)
• Madhu Krishnan (Bristol) - respondent

11.15 Refreshment break

11.30 Parallel Panels E

E1 Autofictions, Texts, Styles and Experiments (Chair: Liam Harrison, University of Birmingham)

• Craig McDonald (University of Leeds): “‘Being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again’: The Production of Literary Empathy in Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy”
• Ekaterina Martynenko (Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don): “Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and the Profaning of the Epistolary Novel Canon”
• Caroline Wintersgill (UCL): “The ‘Left-Handed Monkey Wrench’ and the Literary Novel: Endings and Genre Definitions in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Naomi Alderman’s The Power”
• Niklas Cyril Fischer (University of Fribourg): “Careful Styles: Ekphrastic Knowing in Contemporary Novels”

E2 Rethinking the “Modern”: Developing a Transglossic Literature (Chair: Melissa Schuh, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel)

• Sara Upstone (Kingston University)
• Kristian Shaw (University of Lincoln)

12.15 Refreshment break

12.30 Parallel Panels F

F1 Contemporary Literature and the Creative Economy (Chair: Sam Waterman, University of Chichester)

• Sarah Brouillette (Carleton University, Ottawa): “Wattpad and the 'Labour of Love'"
• Sarah Jaffe (Type Media Center): “The Work of Literature”
• Sam Waterman (University of Chichester): “Sally Rooney's Sapiosexuals: Intellectual Romance and the Creative Economy”
• Shirley Lau Wong (U.S. Naval Academy): “Contemporary Ireland and the Creative Economy”

F2 Economies of Production and Precarity in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Chair: Emily Hogg, University of Southern Denmark)

• Eleanor Careless (Birkbeck University): “'Voluntary (hard) labour' in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn”
• Katherine Kruger (University of Sussex): “'I have to go to work, says he, says me, says everybody': Milling about and other Precarious Temporalities in Jenny Offill's Weather"
• Charlotte Terrell (Worcester College, University of Oxford): “The Estate of the Novel: Chris Kraus, Deborah Levy, Property and Precarity”

13.15 Parallel Panels G

G1 Private/Public Spaces and Embodied Practices (Chair: Ankit Raj, Government College Gharaunda, Karnal/Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee )

• Radhika Sharma (Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee): “Extraordinary Body on Stage: A Study of Enactment or Performance of Cancer Comedy in Brian Lobel’s Ball & Other Funny Stories About Cancer (2012)”
• Oliver Haslam (Loughborough University): “‘Gestures Barely Visible’: Minimalism and Repetition in Don DeLillo’s The Silence”
• Crystal Maritta Sam (Kingston University): “Indiana as Islamistan/ Interiors of Indiana”
• Danielle Cameron (University of East Anglia): “New York Ruins, Labour and the Future of Adulthood in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Ling Ma’s Severance”

G2 The 2010s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (Chair: Nick Bentley, Keele)

• Emily Horton (Brunel University)
• Nick Hubble (Brunel University)
• Anna McFarlane (University of Glasgow)

14.00 Refreshment break

14.15 Plenary 4: Writers Live Panel Discussion (Chair: James Peacock, Keele University)

• Jonathan Lethem
• Lisa Blower
• Guy Gunaratne

15.15 Closing remarks, end of conference.