AVMEO Conference

"Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods" took place March 11-12, 2011 and was, in a word, vibrant.

This is an archive of relevant materials for those new to the event and those who wish to revisit it. Please explore, comment, and share:

1) Blog posts:

• Jonathan Gil Harris: "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Twenty Questions"

• Jeffrey J. Cohen: "AVMEO Wrap Up" 

• Lowell Duckert: "It's Co-implicated, AVMEO: Drifting with John Muir, Speaking Stones, and a Slower (Non)humanities"

• Nedda Mehdizadeh: "AVMEO Afterthoughts"

2) Eileen Joy's blog posts at In the Middle that include audiofiles of the plenary lectures and the keynote address:

• "Don't Mess With the Yohan or the Flower Girls"
• Carla Nappi, University of British Columbia, "You Don't Mess With the Yohan: Cotton, Objects, and Becoming Vegetal in Early Modern China" 
• Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan, "Flower Girls" 

• "Sheepy Metaphors, Human-Animal Writing Machines, Styles of Seating, and Sentient Texts"
• Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine, "Of Stools, Chairs, and Trestle Tables: Scenes from the Renaissance Res Publica of Things"
• Julian Yates, University of Delaware, "Sheep Tracks" 
• Eileen Joy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, "You Are Here: A Manifesto"

• "Her Thoughts Were the Hymns of the Praise of Things: The Vibrant Materiality of Jane Bennett"
• Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University, "Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency" with images 

•  "Camels, Medieval Empire, Wolf Children, and Concarnian Companions"
• Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, "With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf Child of Hesse"
• Sharon Kinoshita, University of California, Santa Cruz, "Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire"

• "Get Stoned"
• Valerie Allen, University of Wisconsin-Madison, "Mineral Virtue"
• Kellie Robertson, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, "Exemplary Rocks"

3) Our conference program:

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects

in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

FRIDAY MARCH 11

All sessions at the GW Marvin Center

9:00-10:30: Animal

Marvin Center 309
Moderator and Opening Remarks: Jeffrey J. Cohen, George Washington University

Karl Steel (Brooklyn College): “With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf Child of Hesse”

Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz): “Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire”

11:00-12:30

Concurrent Sessions

I. Talking Animals
Marvin Center 404
Moderator: Sharon Kinoshita, University of California, Santa Cruz

Patricia Har (Cornell University): “More Life: Animal Encounters in the South English Legendary”

Eleonora Stoppino (University of Illinois): “Learning from Monkeys: A Feral Child in Fifteenth-Century Florence”

Sara Gutmann (University at Buffalo): “Chaucer’s Chicks: Ascetic Feminism in The Knight’s Tale and Parliament of Fowls”

II. Object Agency
Marvin Center 309
Moderator: Valerie Allen, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Ben C. Tilghman (Independent Scholar): “The Object Speaks: Prosopopoeia and Objects as Actants in the Early Medieval Period”

Liz Angello (University of South Florida): “Tarquin's Prick”

Allan Mitchell (University of Victoria): “Toy Materialism”

III. Book Power
Marvin Center 310
Moderator: Julian Yates, University of Delaware

Whitney Anne Trettien (Duke University): “So that a Plant is, as it were, an Animal in Quires”: Nehemiah Grew's Biblio-botany”

Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University): “Creative Regeneration: Translingual Mediation, Organic Form, and Multilingual Merchant Miscellanies”

Myra Seaman (College of Charleston): “Objects of Forgiveness in MS Ashmole 61”

12:30-2:00: Lunch

2:00-3:30: Mineral

Marvin Center 309
Moderator: Holly Dugan, George Washington University

Kellie Robertson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “Exemplary Rocks”

Valerie Allen (John Jay College of Criminal Justice): “Mineral Virtue”

4:00-5:30

Concurrent Sessions

I. Metals/Stone/Architecture
Marvin Center 404
Moderator: Carla Nappi, University of British Columbia

Cristina Pangilinan (Vanderbilt University): “Hoccleve and “Feoble Money”“

Shannon Meyer (University of California, Santa Barbara): “Tours, Bours, Linens and Ladies: Accessing the Female Body in the Clerical Imaginary of Medieval England” 

Jaime Marroquín (George Washington University): “When Science and Literature Were One: The Historia General de las cosas de Nueva España by Bernardino de Sahagún”

II. Faith, Objects and Orientations (sponsored by GW MEMSI)
Marvin Center 309
Moderator: J. Gil Harris, George Washington University

Haylie Swenson (George Washington University): “Marvelously Possessed: Human-Animal Interactions in Travel Narratives of the New World”

Mark Bychowski (George Washington University): “Christ on the Cross-dresser: Transgendered Images of God and Performativity as a Sign of Devotion”

Erica Carson (George Washington University): “The Sodomidical-Lesbian Kitchen: Subjects of Conversion in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament”

Laura Feigin (George Washington University): “Paradise Peppered: The Spicy Search for the Path to Paradise in Milton's Paradise Lost and Early Modern Travel Narrative”

Theodora Danylevich (George Washington University): “Perilous Orientations of the Flesh: ‘Cokkys Peyn’ in Nightwood’s Doctor’s Bedroom and in the Kitchen of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament”

III. Ethics
Marvin Center 310
Moderator: Kellie Robertson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Alex Brey (Bryn Mawr College): “Deconstructing Mshatta: A Case Study in the Ethics of Medieval and Modern Architectural Reuse”

Jessica Rosenberg (University of Pennsylvania): “Vegetable ethics and the work of instruction in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Thomas Wilson’s ‘Epistle to Persuade a Young Gentleman to Marriage’”

Rob Wakeman (University of Maryland): “Ben Jonson in Lubberland: Slaughterhouse Ethics and Bartholomew Fair”

6:00: Keynote Address

Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University): “Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency.”

Marvin Center 309
Introduction: Jeffrey J. Cohen, George Washington University

Professor Bennett's keynote address is made possible through the generous support of the Wang Endowed Fund in English Literature and Literary Studies.

7:30: Reception (for registered conference participants)

SATURDAY MARCH 12

All sessions at the Hotel Lombardy

8:00-9:30: Catered Breakfast
Fortuny Room

9:30-11:00

Concurrent Sessions

I. Dark Materials
International Room
Moderator: Karl Steel, Brooklyn College

Eleanor Kaufman (University of California, Los Angeles): “From Nutritive Souls to Mineral Souls”

Denise Albanese (George Mason University): “From Natural History to Biography: The Social Life of the Early Modern Atom”

Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University): “Black Bile: Object, “Quasi-Object”, or Assemblage?”

II. Wondrous Cosmology: Physics, Poetics, Biology (sponsored by postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies)
Board Room
Moderator: Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan

Liza Blake (New York University): “Golding’s Metamorphic Physis and the Meaning of Matter”

Anna Klosowska (University of Miami, Ohio): “Madeleine de l’Aubespine’s Baroque Metamorphoses after Post-Phenomenology”

Daniel C. Remein (New York University): “Towards a Poetics of Ornamentality and Wonder: Things and Physis in the Old English Riddles at the Crux of Empiricism and Phenomenology”

Ada Smailbegovic (New York University): “From Osmotic Crystallizations to the Folds of the Microvilli: The Poetics of Surface Elaboration as Affective Amplification”

11:30-1:00: Vegetable
International Room
Moderator: Jonathan Hsy, George Washington University

Carla Nappi (University of British Columbia): “You Don’t Mess With The Yohan: Cotton, Objects, and Becoming Vegetal in Early Modern China”

Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan): “Flower Girls”

1:00-2:00: Catered Lunch
Fortuny Room

2:00-3:30

Concurrent Sessions

I. Fuck Nature
International Room
Moderator: Eileen Joy, Southern Illinois University

Joseph Campana (Rice University): “Animal, Vegetable, Child: Futures of the History of Sexuality”

Holly Dugan (George Washington University): “‘Rude, Raw, and Muddy’: Playing Ape in Early Modern England”

Vin Nardizzi (University of British Columbia): “Tree Huggers and Other Philodendrists in Early Modern Poetry”

II. Consider the Creature
Board Room
Moderator: Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine

Rebecca Davis (University of California, Irvine): “‘Cristes creature’: The Exposed Soul in Piers Plowman”

Donovan Sherman (University of California, Irvine): “Anti-Memorials: Flesh and Soul in Coriolanus”

4:00-5:30: Ethics
International Room
Moderator: Madhavi Menon, American University

Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville): “The Middle Voice, Vicarious Causation, and Natality: A Manifesto”

Julian Yates (University of Delaware): “Sheep Tracks”

6:00: Objects and Endings
International Room
Moderator (and Concludor): Jonathan Gil Harris, George Washington University

Julia Reinhard Lupton (University of California, Irvine): “Of Chairs, Stools and Trestle Tables: Scenes from the Renaissance Res Publica of Things”

7:00: Conference Dinner at Rasoi (1810 K Street N.W.)