This paper explores Egypt’s virtual and physical Islamic spaces of learning and socialization, and their transformation in the wake of the 2013 coup and subsequent Rābʿa Massacre. It suggests that while these spaces continue to offer public Islamist intellectuals platforms to share reformist socioreligious visions, and to offer audiences/participants frameworks for acquiring religious sciences and structuring their lives, they nevertheless started to operate in ways akin to group therapy. These spaces are read as sites of naming and processing through immediate and historical traumas, where intellectuals offer alternative agendas of religious action that are meant to both redress the political failures of pre-2013 Islamism and offer avenues for spiritual reflection, healing, and growth. Examining the output of a handful of intellectuals and the discursive spaces sustained with their audiences, this paper casts these intellectuals as revisionist post-Islamists who, by reconfiguring mainstream Islamist theories of ethics, temporality, and history, are urging their audience to rethink the telos of their worship. In doing so, they offer what this paper terms a “self-attunement” model of Islamist self-fashioning in lieu of the pre-coup “self-actualization” mode. This theoretical intervention aims to fill a lacuna in conceptualizations and studies of post-Islamism, and to interrogate Islamist and postcolonial entanglements in Egyptian history.

Aseel Azab-Osman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religious Studies. Her interests span Islamic political thought, ethics, and urban affect. Her dissertation examines the use of the dual concept of altamkīn walistiḍʿāf (divine empowerment and disempowerment) in the work and practice of Egyptian Islamists and their transnational networks. She considers how Islamist activists and thinkers have employed this concept to theorize questions of subaltern positionality, disempowerment, social change, sociological theory, and political agency. Focusing on the traumatic violence of the 2013 Rābʿa Massacre, she shows how the loss of revolutionary hope has generated a desire to revisit the concept of disempowerment and to imbue it with a new sense of agency and religious meaning. Her academic work has been published in The Graduate Journal of the Harvard Divinity School and The Journal of Interreligious Studies. (Bio composed by Goutam Piduri)

Between 1545 and 1810, one-fifth of the world’s total silver came from the mines of Potosí, Bolivia. The circulation of this silver contributed to the origins of the global economy and generated new imaginations of transport infrastructure. Drawing on historic maps and travelers’ accounts, it is possible to trace the historic relationship between space, risk, and profit, and identify a key turning point. In the 18th century, the Spanish colonial administration moved away from direct taxes on silver mining and toward indirect taxes on commerce. Increasing tax revenue was no longer about mining more silver; instead, it was about accelerating the rate at which it circulated. As a result, knowledge of distance and time became increasingly important. Specific stopping points on the route were mapped, and the distance between them tabulated. Compared with the largely undifferentiated landscape of earlier representations, 18th-century maps and guidebooks depict a series of straight lines punctuated by regularly spaced waystations. Often associated with a generalized Enlightenment-era focus on measurement, this new form of representation is better understood as both produced by and productive of the new imperial economics. Distance was time, and time, more than ever before, was money.

Matthew Ballance is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology. As a historical archaeologist, he draws on both material and archival evidence to examine the relationship between infrastructure, colonialism, and extractivism capitalism in Southern Bolivia. His dissertation research examines the formation, regulation, and use of the Camino Real, or “royal highway,” during the Bourbon Reforms of the late 18th-century. His scholarly work is driven by a desire to reframe discourse around Indigenous and local agency in the colonial state, and to illuminate the historical conditions that continue to shape contemporary inequality. As a result, his research frames infrastructure as something that emerges not from top-down planning, but through negotiation between the colonial state and Indigenous communities. He received his B.A. in Archaeology and History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his M.A. in Anthropology from Colorado State University. (Bio composed by Shirley Mak)

This paper begins with a critique of the ossified traditions of formal analysis in Western classical music, arguing that mainstream models reduce musical form to stable, a priori structures disconnected from the perceptual experience of listening. Drawing on phenomenology and cybernetic aesthetics, the paper proposes a new framework of formal analysis, exploring both the entering of a virtual space of formal potential, as well as a schema for the construction of sonic form through engagements with the theories of Abraham Moles and Bernd Alois Zimmermann. A detailed analysis of Zimmermann’s own “Marche du décervellage” from his ballet “Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu” demonstrates how this dual schema can produce a richer and more temporally adaptable understanding of form, resisting a prescriptive formalism and instead framing listening as an active and interpretive process. By retheorizing form as an emergent structure mediated by the listener, this paper contributes to broader interdisciplinary discourses on time, perception, and aesthetics.

Nick Bentz is a composer, violinist, and multimedia artist pursuing a Ph.D. in the Music and Multimedia Composition program, whose work seeks to render intimately personal spaces imbued with an individual sense of storytelling and narrative. His dissertation aims at expanding conventional ways of thinking form in music by foregrounding the dynamic interplay between performer and audience. He holds an M.M. in Composition from the University of Southern California, and he also holds a B.M. in Violin Performance and Composition and an M.M.. in Violin Performance from the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. His music has been performed by leading artists, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the International Contemporary Ensemble, and his multimedia works have been exhibited at venues across the U.S. and China. (Bio composed by Sönke Parpart)

In both cinematic and gene editing technologies, the cut could be said to function as a central cultural technique (Siegert). Beyond the analogies rendered possible by the semiotic underpinnings of both film and genetic code, as well as their privileged relations to the production of life, this paper argues that early debates in film theory prefigured the bioethical controversies around the (non-)intervention into life enabled by emergent genetic editing technologies, such as CRISPR. Scholarship on the mediating conditions of genetic code has typically attended to textuality and its complications within structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructive theories (Kay, Derrida), alongside the concomitant rise of digital cinema (Manovich, Rosen). Without compromising a formalist consideration of film-as-text, this paper turns to the materiality of DNA by taking up earlier 20th-century debates — including Soviet montage and Bazinian realism — within analog film techniques to problematize the cut as an enduring ontological, aesthetic, and ethical problem. In addition to addressing contemporary bioethical debates through cinematic ideologies, this paper aims to model a disruption of the informational/material binary that may be mobilized beyond the technologies under analysis.

Elizabeth Berman is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, who is also pursuing an M.A. in German Studies and a graduate certificate from the program in Science, Technology, and Society. She holds B.A.s in German Studies and the History of Art from Brown University and an M.A. in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she was also a Fulbright scholar and lecturer. Her research and teaching engage broadly with modern German and German-Jewish thought, spanning interests including psychoanalysis, bioethics and disability, philosophies of technology and temporality, and film and media theory. In addition to her scholarship, she currently serves as an assistant editor for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. (Bio composed by Nick Bentz)

Indigeneity in the U.S. has often been linked with bygone times, turning Native Americans into relics of the past. In his novel There There, Tommy Orange writes against the stereotypes that confine Indigeneity to imagined prehistoric times and challenges the monolithic representation of Native Americans by linking the lives of multiple characters who live in Oakland. This paper argues that There There deconstructs and reframes Native Americans as heterogeneous and contemporaneous, existing right here and now in 21st-century American society, not as mere participants or second-class citizens of the past. The paper focuses on the novel’s polyphonic chorus of Urban Indians whose paths cross and intersect at the Big Oakland Powwow, the role of the internet and virtually authentic identity, and the bitingly tragic ending of the mass shooting to contend that Orange’s novel opens a new arena for urban Indigeneity to claim its stake as “modern and relevant, alive.”

Choa Choi is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English, studying 20th-century and contemporary multi-ethnic American literatures, with a focus on relational ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and environmental humanities. Her research examines how the language around food production, globalization, and Cold War ideology concretizes, challenges, or reimagines the relationship between the individual self and collective community, as well as the demarcations between literary genres. In her current project, she has been reflecting on the outside, being an outsider, and nonbelonging as subjects and modalities for research. She grapples with the expectations and assumptions that delimit ethnic boundaries, particularly in the American context, seeking to question and problematize them. She draws out the ways in which authors use the material nature of authorship, storytelling, and language to deconstruct cultural ideas of Indigeneity and racialized existence. (Bio composed by Sofía Rocha)

The results of two high-profile DNA tests became public less than two months apart in 1998. Both tests affirmed sexual contact between presidents of the United States and women 30 years their junior — one an enslaved Virginian, one an unpaid White House intern. Sixteen years later, in 2014, artist Marisa Williamson staged a conversation between the women, Sally Hemings and Monica Lewinsky, whose sexual contact with Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Bill Clinton, respectively, began roughly 207 years apart. Williamson’s live performance documented by video, titled Sally & Monica’s Hot Tub Hangout, this essay argues, contributes to a consideration of the women involved in public sex scandals just as it contributes to the field of consent studies. It does so by avoiding representing Hemings and Lewinsky as one-dimensional symbols of consent and/or unconsent in favor of posing questions about their interior lives that have largely gone unasked. Through a close read of Hot Tub Hangout that invites Williamson into a discussion of her work 11 years after its making, this essay proposes a new field of study that Williamson’s performance not only makes imaginable but offers as a pairing in need of concurrent analysis: Hemings and Lewinsky studies.

Amber Hawk Swanson is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Her scholarship draws on her highly collaborative multimedia performance and sculpture practice, which over two decades has been constellating questions of robotics and transpeciation, investigations of animacy and animal intimacy, and complications of care, consent, and desire in the context of queerness and disability. Her practice has addressed these themes through material and conceptual engagement with captive marine mammals, silicone Dolls, and networks of care among the community of silicone Doll-loving men known as iDollators. Discussions of her work are included in Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018) and Jillian Hernandez’s “Meditations on the Multiple” (2013), among others. Her current scholarly work interrogates and undoes the transhistorical rhetoric of sex scandals and transactional consent formations by thinking with Marisa Williamson’s performance Sally & Monica’s Hot Tub Hangout (2014). (Bio composed by Elizabeth Berman)

In 1998, Yo-Yo Ma founded the Silk Road Project to bring musicians from countries along the historical Silk Road in collaboration with Western musicians. Initially intended as a short-term, four-year experiment, the events of September 11, 2001 invoked an urgent sense for the continuation of the Silk Road Project. Drawing on archival sources and oral interviews, this paper documents the founding and development of the Silk Road Project from an experimental exploration of the intercultural in music towards a stance that inextricably links it with ethical dimensions around culture and globalization. This was made possible through the collaboration between musicians, industry agents, and scholars, whose collective efforts reveal one organization’s negotiation of ethics, aesthetics, and practices of music making while navigating the celebrations and anxieties around globalization.

Shirley Mak is a Ph.D. candidate in the Musicology and Ethnomusicology program. Her dissertation project focuses on the history and practices of intercultural collaborative music making within the Silkroad Ensemble and Global Musician Workshop. Her research is guided by issues of music and identity, the impact of globalization on music, the scales of the transnational and the diasporic, and the inclusion of postcolonial theories in Western classical music pedagogy. She received her M.A. in Musicology from the University of Amsterdam where she wrote her thesis on Silkroad, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and cosmopolitanism, and her B.A. in Music from Queens College, CUNY. (Bio composed by Choa Choi)

In one of the most famous moments in his essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” Walter Benjamin postulates that fascism necessarily entails an “aestheticization of politics.” Rather than reducing the scope of this postulate to the representation of politics, this paper argues that Benjamin is making a more fundamental claim about the underlying logic of fascism itself: namely that fascism, in seeking to organize “the masses” in its specific manner, projects aesthetic principles onto the sphere of politics. Drawing on Kantian aesthetics, Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of the mass ornament, and examples from German fascism in the domains of film and architecture, the paper delineates and identifies the characteristic structure underlying these efforts as a fascist appropriation of the sublime. This fascist sublime, then, represents an aesthetic-political strategy of engendering a corporate collective identity that externalizes its inherent conflicts. This bears more than a passing resemblance to structural effects of social media identified in recent scholarship. For this reason, the paper also considers the implications and limits of the analogy between early 20th- and 21st-century media systems and their political affordances.

Sönke Parpart is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of German Studies. He received his B.A. in European Literatures and his M.A. in German Literature from the University of Marburg. His scholarship is rooted in media theory and studies, animating his interest in literary negotiations of identity, literary periodical studies, and the interdependent histories of media and political imaginaries more broadly. His work examines the constitution of modern subjectivities in and through formal and structural affordances. His dissertation project investigates conceptions of selfhood, sovereignty, and sociality in German tragedy around 1800. With one foot in German academia and one in Anglophone, he co-edited Faszinosum 1950er Jahre: Literatur, Medien und Kultur der jungen Bundesrepublik (transcript, 2024) and contributed to the edited volumes Zeichen des Fremden — und ihre Metaisierung in ästhetischen Diskursen der Gegenwart (Schüren, 2023; Wolfgang Lukas and Martin Nies, eds.) and Literaturtheorie nach 2001 (ed. Patrick Durdel et al.; Matthes & Seitz, 2020). A publication in the Journal of European Periodical Studies (JEPS) is forthcoming. (Bio composed by Aseel Azab-Osman)

This essay explores how the work of Thomas Traherne (1637–1674) frames metaphor as analogous to the accumulation of personal wealth. Traherne’s work speaks to two related 17th-century philosophical debates: the moral status of exchange value and the usefulness of metaphor in religious writing. A postcolonial reading of Traherne’s Poems of Felicity and Centuries of Meditations shows how these questions were linked to ideas of civility. By thinking of property ownership and measurement as a symptom of postlapsarian suffering, rhetorically aligning the accumulation of objects to foreign empires, and using “the rude and barbarous Indian” to critique European attachment to material objects, Traherne’s work reconfigures the conception of “things” and means of referring to them. Such a reconfiguration encourages readers not only to practice temperance, but also to reach an ecstatic state of “felicity” in which wealth becomes an ever-present and incalculable quality. Traherne’s purported aversion to metaphor is therefore coextensive with a civilizational anxiety about the “barbarousness” of the Christian world.

Goutam Piduri is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English. His research explores non-acquisitive forms of imperialist literary expression. His dissertation project, “Owning Renunciation: Studies in Early Modern Non-Possession,” focuses on the literary mechanisms by which non-possession — a cultivated indifference to material goods — is allied to imperialist thought, with a particular focus on the British empire in the 17th century. To this end, he reads a global range of early modern English texts to excavate a counterintuitive relationship between non-possession and empire. His academic work has been published in Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare and Adaptation and is forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. He also works on 20th-century Telugu adaptations of Shakespeare. His translations of Telugu short fiction have appeared in Asymptote and Denver Quarterly. (Bio composed by Matthew Ballance)

This paper places the concepts of disidentification and reclamation in conversation with each other as reactions to an assimilative imperative, seeking to find their limits, resonances, and discordances through close analysis of the work of musical artists Arca and underscores. Informed by frameworks of the barred/border subject, as articulated by Antonio Viego, and performativity — the paper documents and analyzes the sonic, textual, and visual dimensions of these two trans artists of color’s work. The paper illustrates their use of disidentification and reclamation as reactions to an assimilative ideology which asserts the queerness — the strangeness — of every action and inaction they take while simultaneously denying to various degrees their existence, claims to their bodies, privacy, and multiplicity. This analysis particularly highlights illegibility as an expressive modality for queer of color artists in their response to these dismal assimilative limitations. The close reading serves as a foundation from which the paper further interrogates disidentification and reclamation, both in reference to each other and their role in the formation of individual and collective minoritarian identity and subjectivity.

Sofía Rocha is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Music and Multimedia Composition program, where she explores cognition, randomness, movement, poetics, and counterpoint in her music using an eclectic set of frameworks which prioritize emotional intensity. As a composer, she has won the Hermitage Prize at the Aspen Music Festival, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and a Copland House Residency Award. She has additionally held residencies at MacDowell, Avaloch Farm Music Institute, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat and will be a composition fellow at Tanglewood in 2025. Her current scholarly interests are focused on an exploration of the signifier as a (contested) point of identity making, studying the ways in which it allows for, but also limits, the formation of identity. She investigates disidentification and reclamation as strategies which mediate the interactions between assimilation and the formation of minoritarian identity. (Bio composed by Amber Hawk Swanson)

Amanda Anderson is Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities at Brown University. Her research focuses on broad questions of intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the relations among literature, moral life, and politics. Her books include Humanities Theory (forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2025; with Simon During); Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, TRIOS series, 2019; with Rita Felski and Toril Moi), Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology (Oxford University Press, Clarendon Lectures in English Literature, 2018), Bleak Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2016), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton University Press, 2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press, 1993). She is co-editor of George Eliot: A Companion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 2002).

Susan Bernstein is Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University. She works in German, French, and English and American literature and philosophy (18th–21st centuries). She has particular interests in literary theory, literature and the arts, Romanticism, philosophy, and poetry. She has published articles on Nietzsche, Kant, Heine, Shelley, Hoffmann, Derrida, and others. She is the author of Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford University Press, 1998), Housing Problems: Architecture and Writing in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger (Stanford University Press, 2008), and The Other Synaesthesia (SUNY Press, 2023). She is the co-translator, with Peter Fenves and Kevin McLaughlin, of Walter Benjamin’s On Goethe (Stanford University Press, 2025).

Tamara Chin is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She works on comparative approaches to the ancient world with a focus on early Chinese literature and cross-cultural history and aesthetics. Her two books take as their respective starting points the disjunct between approaches to the connected past produced by different disciplinary agendas. Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2014) asks how literary analysis can participate in ongoing debates about Chinese political-economic history and Silk Road archaeology. The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact and the Modern Human Sciences, 1870–1970 (under review) examines how, during the century spanning New Imperialism and Cold War decolonization, geographers, historians, philologists, and linguists fashioned the connected past into a coherent object of systematic inquiry.

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. A specialist in psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and queer studies, he is the author of four monographs, including most recently Reparations and the Human (Duke University Press, 2025), which investigates a history of reparations across the Transpacific and as key term in both political theory and psychoanalysis. He is also editor of numerous collections and special issues. In 2016, he was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. In 2021, he was awarded the Kessler Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS).

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She is Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective. Her academic work has focused on developing a critical theory of settler late liberalism and its aftershocks, elaborated across eight monographs and numerous essays. Her book Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2016) was the recipient of the 2017 Lionel Trilling Award. She has also explored similar thematics in a series of artworks shown in galleries and museums, including Prometeo Gallery, Milan; ar/ge gallery, Bolzano; the Biennale Gherdëina; and MADRE, Naples. Her film, The Inheritance (2021), made with Thomas Bartlett, premiered with Taxispalais, Innsbruck.

Leela Prasad is the St. Purandar Das Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. Her work spans the anthropology of ethics, the poetics of everyday life, social justice, gender, decoloniality, prison life, and Gandhi. Fluent in four Indian languages, she connects early Indic literary and religious thought with contemporary ethical practice. Her book Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (Columbia University Press, 2007) won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book prize. Her second book is The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India (Cornell University Press, 2020). She co-edited Gender and Story in South India (SUNY Press, 2006) and curated “Live Like the Banyan Tree,” the first exhibit on Indian American life. She teaches Gandhi in U.S. prisons and is co-directing Let Us See, a film (with Baba Prasad) on Gandhi’s resonance on a schoolteacher who met him in 1944. She has received major grants and fellowships, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society and Fulbright-Nehru and Guggenheim grants. She is currently President of the American Academy of Religion.