Keynote Speakers

Steven Connor

Grace 2 Professor of English, University of Cambridge

Tones of Face: On Psychophonotypographics

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From the imperial authority conveyed by Times New Roman, designed to embody the values of the newspaper known as ‘The Thunderer’, through to the jumpy, cartoon infantilism of Wingdings, the growing familiarity with the look of letters and the ways in which they may seem to score, colour and perform as well as merely conveying meaning, has created a new dimension, between the visual and the auditory, of ‘hearsee’ understanding. This talk will consider the qualities of tone, register and psychographic feeling enacted through typefaces and some of the implications of the new kind of textual materiality they constitute.

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Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). He has published books on many topics, including Dickens, Beckett, Joyce, value, ventriloquism, skin, flies and air. His most recent books are Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (2016), Dream Machines (2017), The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (2019) and Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (2019).  A History of Asking is due to appear from Open Humanities Press. His website at stevenconnor.com includes lectures, broadcasts, unpublished work and work in progress, including many essays and talks on sound and voice.

Rita Felski

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, University of Virginia

On Resonance: Stoner and Theory

This talk draws out affinities between the ideas of Hartmut Rosa and academic novels by John Williams and Dionne Brand. Both novels capture moments when words crackle, reverberate, come alive; they speak to the transformative aspects of intellectual life, while also portraying alienating aspects of academic institutions. The idea of resonance, I argue, can clarify the force of attachments to both literature and theory, while inspiring a richer account of acts of interpretation. 

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Rita Felski is William R. Kenan., Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia and editor of New Literary History. She was educated at Cambridge University and pursued graduate work in Australia, earning an M.A and Ph.D at Monash University. She took up a position in the English and Comparative Literature Program at Murdoch University in Perth, where she taught for seven years before moving to the U.S.

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Professor Felski’s research interests include literary theory, feminism, comparative literature, and cultural studies. She is the author of Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Harvard UP, 1989), The Gender of Modernity (Harvard UP. 1995), Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York UP, 2000), Literature After Feminism (Chicago UP, 2003) and Uses of Literature (Blackwell’s 2008), as well as the editor of Rethinking Tragedy (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008). She has also published close to fifty articles in journals such as PMLA, New Literary History, Signs, Modernism/Modernity, Theory, Culture and Society, New Formations, and Cultural Critique.