Co-organizers
Anna Fishzon is Assistant Professor of History at Williams College specializing in modern Russian culture. She teaches courses on European cultural history, Stalinism, the history of fashion, nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history, and camp. Fishzon received a PhD from Columbia University and a BA from Duke University. She is the author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, September 2013), and articles on sound recording and celebrity that appeared in Slavic Review and Russian Review. Her current book project considers late Soviet temporality and the queerness of Brezhnev-era childhood.
Anastasia Kayiatos earned a doctoral degree in Slavic and Women’s Studies from the University of California–Berkeley, where she also ran the working groups on Disability Studies and Socialisms & Sexualities from 2008-2012. Selections from her interdisciplinary dissertation on silence and alterity in post-Stalin Russia have been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly and Theatre Survey (in English), the Journal of Social Policy Studies (in Russian), and Astrolabio (in Spanish). The Lambda Nordica special issue on sexualities in transition contains her essay, “Shock and Alla: Capitalist Cures for Socialist Perversities at the End of the Twentieth Century.” Since joining the University of Southern California as a provost’s postdoctoral scholar in the humanities this past fall, Kayiatos has been pursuing her research on suggestive gesture and queer socialist aesthetics. She will continue down this path next year as a Professor of Russian at Macalester College, and an affiliate faculty member of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the concentration in Critical Theory.
Keynote Speaker
Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of five books, including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and has written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam is currently working on several projects, including a book on Fascism and (homo)sexuality. Halberstam has co-edited a number of anthologies, including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston (Indiana University Press, 1995) and a special issue of Social Text with José Muñoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” He is a popular speaker and gives lectures around the country and internationally every year. Lecture topics include: queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film, animation.
Paper Presenters and Panel Chairs
Steven Bruhm, University of Western Ontario
Julie Cassiday, Williams College
Michael Cobb, University of Toronto
Brian Eugenio Herrera, Princeton University
Jacqueline Hidalgo, Williams College
Nat Hurley, University of Alberta
Lauren Kaminsky, New York University
Kenneth Kidd, University of Florida
Derritt Mason, University of Alberta
Tey Meadow, Princeton University
Allison Miller, Rutgers University
Gregory Mitchell, Williams College
Gail Newman, Williams College
Kevin Ohi, Boston College
Michael O’Loughlin, PhD, Adelphi University
Juana María Rodríguez, University of California-Berkeley
Leyla Rouhi, Williams College
Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD (NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis)
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Amherst College
Performers and Animators
Kareem Khubchandani, Northwestern University