Penn's Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies Society's 2025 Graduate Conference welcomes 14 speakers for four panels on the theme of "Collage."
10:25am
Keynote
Dr. Mame-Fatou Niang, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at CMU; Director-Founder of the Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic (CBESA)
11:15am
Break
11:30am–12:50pm
Constructing and Negotiating Identities
Chair: Sarah Marie Leitenberger, University of Pennsylvania
I. Massimo Sassi, University of Pennsylvania
Beyond Canto Sociale: Value and Exchange in Italian Folk Revival
II. Zhanar Beketova, University of Pennsylvania
Two Books, Two Audiences, One Content: A Comparative Analysis of Arendt's German and English Prefaces to the Origins of Totalitarianism
III. Marcus Papandrea, University of Pennsylvania
Pulcinella's Lazzi
IV. Kateřina Segešová, Sorbonne University/Masaryk University
Collage as a Strategy in Modern Catholic Poetry
1:50–2:50pm
Constructing Gender and Sexuality through Collage
Chair: Nicola Guida, University of Pennsylvania
I. Noah Metz, University of New Mexico
Writing in the Era of the Technical Image: Guillaume Dustan's Literary and Home Video Collages
II. Vanessa Weller, Michigan State University
Technology and the Gendered Body: Dada Artists, Collage, Apparatus
III. Lacey Ramirez, Washington University in Saint-Louis
Literature as a Collage to Represent History: Deconstructing Desiree Congo and the Bluest Eye
3:20–4:40pm
Constructing New Narratives in Postcolonial Times
Chair: Karine Macarez, University of Pennsylvania
I. Zoe McHodgkins, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dante's Presence in Post-Colonial Franco-Caribbean Literature: Acceptance of Style and Rejection of Ideology
II. Samantha Raup, Columbia University
Plagiarism or Postcolonial Collage? Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence and the Anglophone Literary World
III. Dakshayani Shankar Sthipam, Emory University
The Breast Lingers: Tracing Power in Fragmentations of Algeria's Woman Revolutionary
IV. Joel Ngameleu Ngameni, Washington University in Saint-Louis
Narrating the Rwandan Genocide in Cinema Through Collage: An Analysis of Robert Favreau's Film Un Dimanche à Kigali
4:40–5:40pm
Constructing Visual Arts
Chair: Constance Sourisse, University of Pennsylvania
I. Song Huang, University of Virginia
Fragmentation and Fusion in Angelin Preljocaj's The Nights and La Fresque: Collage as a Choreographic Strategy in Neo-Orientalist Ballet
II. Nathan Kouri, Boston College
Is There a Cubist Cinema? A Collage Essay
III. Anthony Bevevino, Boston College
Futurist Literature and Collage: When the Radical Creates the Recognizable
5:40pm
Closing Remarks
6:00pm
Reception
The keynote speaker is Mame-Fatou Niang, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Director of the Center for Black European Studies at the Atlantic at Carnegie Mellon University. She conducts research on economies of the living/living economy, Blackness in Contemporary France, and French Universalism. Dr. Niang is the author of Identités Françaises (Brill, 2019) and the co-author of Universalisme (Anamosa, 2022).
Niang is an Artist-in-Residence at the Ateliers Médicis in Paris, working on a project entitled “Échoïques” (Sounds of Silence).
In 2015, Niang co-directed “Mariannes Noires: Mosaïques Afropéennes” with Kaytie Nielsen, a sophomore in her French class. The film follows seven Afro-French women as they investigate the pieces of their mosaic identities, and unravel what it means to be Black and French, Black in France. In 2021, she served as the Melodia Jones Distinguished Chair of French Studies at University at Buffalo.
Niang has collaborated with Slate, Jacobin, and several news outlets in France. She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Mosaica Nigra: Blackness in 21st-century France.
