Friday, March 26

5:00p
Keynote Address
Peter Stallybras, Material and Belief
Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and Co-Director of the Penn Humanities Forum

Saturday, March 27

9:30-10:00a
Welcome and coffee, tea, and pastries

10:00a-11:45p
Session 1
Mediated Experience: Tradition, Epistemology, and Memory (Moose Room)
Faculty Discussant: Sara Nadal-Melsió, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages--Hispanic Studies
Student Moderator: Jason Rheins, Philosophy

Erica Miller, Romance Languages--Hispanic Studies
When All Signs Have Been Erased: Memory and Belief in Sergio Chejfec’s Los planetas

Alexine Fleck, English
Sprees of Abandon: Addiction and Belief in Drug Memoirs

Phill Penix-Tadsen, Romance Languages--Hispanic Studies
The Emergent Paradigm of Textual Circuitry: Epistemological Reprocessing in Digital Society

Session 2
Magic, Myth, and Mysticism (Seminar Room)

Faculty Discussant: Igor Kopytoff, Professor of Anthropology
Student Moderator: Matthew Rutz, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies--Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, Romance Languages--Italian
The Magic of Painting in Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli

Ömür Harmansah, History of Art
The Shepherd, the Cattle-Pen, and the Cedar Forest: Ideals of Divine Kingship, Mythical City, and Fecund Landscapes in Early Mesopotamian Literature

J Melvin, Religious Studies
Belief, Experience, and Religious History’s “Mystical Turn”: Classifying the Writings of St. John of Avila

12:00-1:00p | Lunch

1:00-2:45p
Session 3
Heterogeneous Beliefs: Accommodations and Limitations (Moose Room)
Faculty Discussant: Carol Muller, Associate Professor of Music and "Belief" Topic Director (2003-2004) for the Penn Humanities Forum
Student Moderator: Holly Maluk Plastaras, Anthropology (Emory University)

Julia Rabig, History
“Black Buffers”--Evangelical Entrepreneurship Meets Black Power on the Streets of Washington, D.C.

Jen Schaaf, History
Catholic Womanhood as “True Womanhood”: The Dilemma of Moral Suasion at the Center of Peter McCorry’s Mount Benedict

Melina Bell, Philosophy
Perpetuating Patriarchy: The Public Promotion of Traditional Marriage

Session 4
Symbolic Dimensions of the Material (Seminar Room)
Faculty Discussant: Leonard Primiano, Associate Professor of Religious Studies (Cabrini College) and adjunct faculty in Folklore and Folklife
Student Moderator: Ellen Welch, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory

Tarek Kahlaoui, History of Art
Using the Infidels’ Golden Money as a Primary Currency: The Capitalization of the Monetary System in Ottoman Tunisia (16th and 17th Centuries)

Kathryn O’Rourke, History of Art
Modern Beliefs: Cathedrals, Catholics, and Capitalists in Late 20th-Century Nicaragua

Elias Muhanna, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
How the Qaf Got Its Spots: Aesthetics of Ambiguity in Medieval Arabic Inscriptions

3:30-4:45p
Session 5
Literary Conversions (Moose Room)
Faculty Discussant: Liliane Weissberg, Joseph P. Glossberg Term Professor of the Humanities in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature
Student Moderator: Madera Allan, Romance Languages--Hispanic Studies

Catherine Nicholson, English, and Briallen Hopper, English (Princeton University)
Religious Belief and the Practice of Literary Criticism

Namrata Poddar, Romance Languages--French
The Oriental Discourse in Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Ellen Welch, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
A Romance of Conversion: Lafayette’s Zayde and the Transformation of Genre

Session 6
Duplicities of Ideology and Practice (Seminar Room)
Faculty Discussant: Stefano Cracolici, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages--Italian
Student Moderator: Mara Taylor, Germanic Languages and Literatures

Kristina Baumli, English
Belief, Whiteness, and Double Consciousness in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

Rika Saito, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Modern Myth of Language Use: Making Women in Japanese Society

Liliana Milkova, History of Art
Red Horizons: Soviet Ideology and the Sots Art of Erik Bulatov

Reception and informal discussion to follow conclusion of conference