Date: Thursday, April 7 (MORBID ANATOMY) and Friday April 8 (CUNY GRADUATE CENTER)
Time: 7:00 PM (THURSDAY) and 9:15 am (CUNY)
FREE but tickets need to be reserved here for reception.
April 7: Opening Night AT THE MORBID ANATOMY MUSEUM
This event will open The Way of All Flesh, an interdisciplinary academic conference hosted by the English Students Association of the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum.
The rountable will feature short talks by a number of Morbid Anatomy Museum community members; Daniel Margocsy (Hunter College) will speak on “Erotic Dissections: Picturing Sex in Anatomy Atlases;” Evan Michelson of Obscura Antiques and TV’s “Oddities” will present “Withering Flesh: Making Friends in the Palermo Catacombs” and Shannon Taggart, photographer and independent scholar will expound on “Metaphysical Flesh: Spiritualism, Mediumship, and Ectoplasm.” The panel will be moderated by Jason Tougaw, Professor of English at Queens College and The Graduate Center and author of “Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel and the forthcoming Touching Brains: Literary Experiments in Twenty-First Century Neuromania.”
The panel will be followed by a reception and a tour of the Museum’s current exhibition, House of Wax, with Peter McIssac, Professor of Germanics, University of Washington.
April 8: AT CUNY GRADUATE CENTER 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016
8:45-9:15am, Registration and Coffee, Segal Theater
9:15-10:45am, Opening Keynote, Segal Theater
Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University), A Burden Heavier Than the Earth: Paradise Lost and Suicide Prevention
11:00am-5:30pm, The Art of Ari Richter, room C204
11:00am-12:30pm, Conference Presentations, C-Level
Illness, Sickness, and Pain: Affective Dimensions of Flesh, room C201
— Gabrielle Everett (Rutgers University), “Choked with Disgust”: Affective Paralysis in No No Boy and The Third Life of Grange Copeland
— Jessica Chace (New York University), Palliative Tongues and the Healing Power of Nonhuman Flesh
— Chloë Wilcox (), “Wyth Handes Handled”: Staging Devotional Bodies in a Late Medieval Prayerbook
— Alicia Andrzejewski (CUNY Graduate Center), Abortive Imagery in William Shakespeare’s Richard III
The Properties of Flesh: Ownership and the Body, room C202
— Leah Perry (SUNY Empire State College), “I Can Sell My Body If I Wanna”: Riot Grrrl Body Writing, Feminist Resistance, and Neoliberalism
— Irene Healey (Visual Artist and Certified Clinical Anaplastologist), Prosthesis As Flesh: Art and Empowerment in the Restoration of Missing Soft Tissue
— Brittany Cook (University of Dayton), “Fairness”: The Autonomy of Altered Flesh
Ontology of the Body, room C203
— Moosje Goosen (University of Amsterdam), Phantom Limbs, or the Case of the Becoming-Body
— Andrea Whitacre (Indiana University), Pressing the Flesh: Infant Bodies and the Ontology of Shape
— Alexander McAdams (Rice University), “One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul”: Flesh, Desire, and Materialist Wandering in Paradise Lost
12:30-1:30pm, Lunch
1:30-3:00pm, Conference Presentations, C-Level
Consuming Desire: Flesh, Food, and Sexuality, room C201
— Penelope Meyers Usher (New York University), Fish/Flesh/Sex: The Erotics of Fish Flesh in Early Modern England
— Sydnee Wagner (CUNY Graduate Center), “A Greedy Delight”: Sexual Cannibalism in Early Modern Travel Literature
— Zoë Rodine (University of Minnesota), Good Enough to Eat: Locating Desire in Television Cooking Shows
Flesh and Romanticism, British and American, room C202
— Bret Moore (University of Michigan), “let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional)”: Malignant Neoplasms and Penning Pain in the Romantic Era
— Bradley Nelson (CUNY Graduate Center), Until Birth, an Impossibility: Emerson’s Experience of Mystical Birth
— Christina Katopodis (CUNY Graduate Center), Margaret Fuller’s Conversations: Early Feminist Pragmatic Method
TO COME: Panel organized by Amy Herzog (Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College and Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center) and Margaret Schwartz (Fordham University)
3:15-4:45pm, Conference Presentations, C-Level
Technologies of the Flesh, room C201
— Benjamin Olin (New York University), Flesh of the TV Studio: Artists’ Television as Techno-Social Assemblage
— Brandon Rogers (University of North Carolina), Fleshing Out Haptic Technology in Virtual Reality Gaming
— Amber Chiacchieri (CUNY Graduate Center), The Prehuman Cyborg and the Posthuman Self: Stelarc’s Uncanny Performance Art
Semiotics of the Flesh, room C202
— Livia Woods (CUNY Graduate Center), Flesh It Out: Reading Practice and Reading Pregnancy in George Eliot
— Amelia Greene (CUNY Graduate Center), FleshMessages: Octavia Butler and a language of forms
— Nasreen Khan (Seton Hall University), The Middle Way: Trans/National, Sexual, Racial Identities and the Soothsayer Archetype
Corpo Santo: Catholicism, Anatomical Science, and Corporeality, room C203
— Karen Bachmann (Pratt Institute and FIT), Holy Body Parts!: Speaking Reliquaries and Catholic Saints
— Colin Dickey (author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, and Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith), The Flayed Saint: Bartholomew, Vesalius, and the Anatomized Corpse
— Lauren Davis (Independent Scholar), Body & Skull: Skeletal Death Iconography and the Fear of One’s Mortal Flesh Before the Reformation
— Joanna Ebenstein (founder, Morbid Anatomy Museum), An Enlightenment-era St. Teresa Ravished By Communion with the Invisible Forces of Science: An Introduction to the Anatomical Venus
4:50-5:20pm, Performance Art, C-Level
Ian Deleón and Agrofemme
5:30-7:00pm, Closing Keynote, Segal Theater
Evening Keynote: Dominic Pettman (The New School), Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More, And Less, Than Human
7:00pm, Closing Reception, English Lounge (room 4406)
More on the conference can be found here: https://
Image: Bartholomeo Eustachi, Romanae archetypae tabulae anatomicae novis…, 1783
