Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Literature
University College Dublin, Ireland
17-20 June, 2025
A Conference sponsored by
Taighde Eireann / Research Ireland
Tuesday 17st June 2025
(Museum of Literature Ireland, St Stephen’s Green)
18:30-18:45 – Welcome and Introductory Remarks
18:45-20:00 – Opening Session
“Irish Writers and Literary Institutions: Authors in Conversation”
Suad Aldarra, Kevin Power, and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe (chaired by Tim Groenland)
20:00-21:00 – Wine Reception
Wednesday 18th June 2025
(LexIcon Library, Dun Laoghaire)
09:00-09:30 – Registration
09:30-10:45 – Keynote Lecture
Chair: Adam Kelly (University College Dublin)
Sarah Brouillette (Carleton University), “Ambient Audible, Ambient Amazon”
10:45-11:15 – Coffee Break
11:15-12:45 – Panel Session A
A1 Crisis and the Institution(s) of Literature
Chair: Christopher Newfield (Independent Social Research Foundation)
Tim Jelfs (University of Groningen), “Crisis as the Structural Signature of Modernity”
Emma Crowley (University of Bristol), “Reading on the Picket Line”
Jeffrey Lawrence (Rutgers University), “Questions for Institutionalists”
A2 Indian Literature and the Institution(s) of Translation
Chair: Michaela Kralova (University College Dublin)
Chandni Ananth (University of Münster), “The Infrastructure of Indian Translations: Institutions and Actors”
D-M Withers (University of Exeter), “Trust in Translation: Deben Bhattacharya as Literary Translator”
Miaïna Razakamanantsoa (University of Münster), “Institutions Dis/trusting Institutions: Power Dynamics Between Literary and Judicial Bodies in the Global Marketing of Translated Literature”
A3 Dis/Trusting the Numbers
Chair: Alexander Kroll (University College Dublin)
Aurora Argenzio (University of Rome Tor Vergata), “Developing Trust Through Data: Rethinking Literary Institutions with Feminist Perspectives on Quantitative Methods”
Clara Juncker (York St John University), “The Rise of the Book Influencer: How Publishers Have Bypassed the Distrust of Readers”
Tom Williams (University of Virginia), “The Prize of Admission: How the Booker Adapted to the Age of Amazon”
12:45-13:45 – Lunch Break
13:45-15:15 – Panel Session B
B1 Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Irish Literature
Chair: Orlaith Darling (University College Dublin)
Sinéad Moynihan (University of Exeter), “‘The Business End’: Irish Writers and U.S. Agents at Mid-Century”
Tim Groenland (University College Dublin), “Literary Agents and Contemporary Irish Fiction”
Dilâra Yilmaz (Kiel University), “Class and the Affordability of Trust in Ireland’s Literary Industry: Professionalised Creative Writing, Arts Council Promises, and Distrust in Cultural and Academic Institutions”
B2 Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Poetry
Chair: Katerina Pavlidi (University College Dublin)
Conrad Steel (University of Oxford), “Rhyme and the Micro-Production of Belief: from the FWWCP Archive”
Sean Pessin (University of California, Los Angeles), “Examining Concentration and Amplification from 1988–1997 in Best American Poetry”
Truong Tran (Mills College at Northeastern University), “Abstraction as Luxury: Poetry and the University’s Geography of Dis/placement”
B3 Para-Institutions of Literary Production
Chair: Lee Konstantinou (University of Maryland)
Tim Sommer (University of Munich), “Postwar Fiction and the Modern Archive: Institutional and Literary Histories”
Joseph Williams (University of East Anglia), “The Peri-Academic Reader in Postwar Britain”
Kathryn Roberts (University of Groningen), “Reading for Utopia: The Residency as Literary and Social Form”
15:15-15:45 – Coffee Break
15:45-17:15 – Panel Session C
C1 Institutional Cultures of Reading
Chair: Simone Murray (Monash University)
Owain Burrell (University of Warwick), “Teaching the Constitution: The Grammar School, Literature, and the British State”
Ben Davies (University of Portsmouth), “Critical Reading and the Fantasy of Method”
Claire Squires (University of Stirling), “BOOK AC(ademia)”
C2 Contemporary Fictions of Institutional Dis/Trust
Chair: Matt Prout (University College Dublin)
Dominic Dean (University of Sussex), “Complicity, Longing and Belonging: The Ambivalent Institutions of Kazuo Ishiguro”
Andrew Clarke (Maynooth University), “‘Reality Hunger,’ Readers’ Trust, and Market Expectations in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief’
Sara Dahlberg (Lund University), “‘But ours was a community of doubt’: Disappointment and Distrust in the C21st Academic Novel”
C3 Dis/Trusting Global Literary Institutions
Chair: Clare Ní Cheallaigh (University College Dublin)
Gaurav Desai (University of Michigan), “The Institutions of African Literature, 1945-2010”
Katerina Pavlidi (University College Dublin), “Poets, Pirates, and Utopia Cruisers: Dis/trust in Literary Institutions in Contemporary Russophone Poetry”
Anna Murashova (University of Tartu & Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam), “Is the Digital Self-Publishing Literary Platform a Dis/Trustworthy Institution? A Case Study of Russian Self-Publishing Platforms”
Thursday 19th June 2025
(LexIcon Library, Dun Laoghaire)
09.30-10.45 – Keynote Lecture
Chair: Tim Groenland (University College Dublin)
Simone Murray (Monash University), “The Institution of the Analytic Essay in the Age of ChatGPT”
10:45-11:15 – Coffee Break
11:15-12:45 – Panel Session D
D1 Dis/Trusting the Sociology of Literature
Chair: Sarah Brouillette (Carleton University)
Robert Chodat (Boston University), “Trust, Reliance, and Confidence in the Academy”
Adam Kelly (University College Dublin), “Trusting Institutions Again? Latour and Literary Sociology”
Jeremy Rosen (University of Utah), “Misplaced Trust in Bourdieu and Critique”
D2 Dis/Trusting Reading Communities
Chair: Stevie Marsden (Edinburgh Napier University)
Angelina Eimannsberger (University of Pennsylvania), “The Romance of Bookstores”
Nicola Glaubitz (Kiel University), “‘The advice to trust is so good’: How Readers Build Trust in Long Complex Novels”
Natalie Wall (University of Liverpool), “‘I don’t care that it won a Pulitzer!’ Literary Value and Critical Communities on Goodreads”
D3 Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Publishing
Chair: Miriam Johnson (Oxford Brookes University)
Charlotte Terrell (King’s College London), “Archives of Administration”
Carla Schäfer (University of Münster), “From Book Men to Book Worker Power: Labor Activism in the U.S. Trade Publishing Industry”
Alex Orr (Independent Scholar), “Diversity and Distrust in the UK Publishing Industry: BPOC Workers’ Experience of Diversity Initiatives Through the Lens of Racial Capitalism”
12:45-13:45 – Lunch Break
13:45-15:15 – Panel Session E
E1 Critique, the University, and Contemporary Writing
Chair: Rhona Jamieson (University College Dublin)
Orlaith Darling (University College Dublin), “Nothing to Say: The Contemporary MFA Novel”
Denise Wong (Justus-Liebig University, Giessen), “Writing Against the Iterative Cliché of Critique”
Matt Prout (University College Dublin), “The Novel as/and the Pedagogical Institution in Elif Batuman’s Either/Or”
E2 Authors and Institutions
Chair: James Baxter (Trinity College Dublin)
Anna Devereux (University of East Anglia), “Dis/Trusting Educational Institutions with Doris Lessing”
Trent Anderson (University of Amsterdam), “The Careering Author: Gerald Murnane’s Professional Negotiations with ‘The Breathing Author’”
Philip Ryan (University College Dublin), “Plastic Molly: The Ecstasy of Popular Bloomsday”
E3 Literary Institutions of the Postwar
Chair: Günter Leypoldt (University of Heidelberg)
Greg Barnhisel (Duquesne University), “How Norman Pearson Made Yale the Center of Modern Literary Study”
Niklas Gödde (University of Münster), “How Henry Kissinger and the Ford Foundation taught Ingeborg Bachmann to write about the democratic plurality of the United States”
John Greaney (University College Dublin), “Contemporary Modernisms: The Reconstitution of Europe and the Renationalisation of the Avant-Garde”
15:15-15:45 – Coffee Break
15:45-17:15 – Panel Session F
F1 Dis/Trusting Prize Culture
Chair: Kathryn Roberts (University of Groningen)
Stevie Marsden (Edinburgh Napier University) and Christina Neuwirth (Independent Scholar), “‘He didn’t show up’ – Exploring discourses of (dis)trust in prize- giving and prestige”
Günter Leypoldt (University of Heidelberg), “Pynchon’s Pulitzer Scandal and the Ethnography of Institutional Trust”
Kai Hopen (University of Groningen), “The MacArthur Fellowships, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and Bourgeois Engaged Literature Circa 2016”
F2 Dis/Trusting the Book Club
Chair: Phil Ryan (University College Dublin)
Nicola Wilson (University of Reading), “Defining what a good ‘book club book’ looks like: Meet The Book Society, 1929-68”
Zoe Patterson (Trinity College Dublin), “We’re All Having Fun at Finnegans Wake: James Joyce reading groups and the intersection of academic and non-academic readership”
Lauren Hough (Pacific Northwest College of Art), “Literary ‘It’ Girls and the Condition of Knowledge”
F3 Marketing and Minoritisation in Publishing
Chair: Andrew Clarke (Maynooth University)
James Baxter (Trinity College Dublin), “‘Amistad means friendship’: Random House and Paperbacking the ‘Black Aesthetic’”
Joana Roqué Pesquer (KU Leuven), “Pockets of Resistance?: Independent Presses, Rhetorics of Translation, and the Subversion of Marketed Inclusivity”
Valentina López Liendo (University of Heidelberg), “‘She was only ever a token’: Race-Making and Publishing in R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface”
17.30 Walk on Pier
19.00 Conference Dinner, Royal Marine Hotel
Friday 20th June 2025
(LexIcon Library, Dun Laoghaire)
09:30-10:45 – Keynote Lecture
Chair: Adam Kelly (University College Dublin)
Christopher Newfield (Independent Social Research Foundation), “The Future of Literary Knowledge in an Authoritarian West”
10:45-11:15 – Coffee Break
11:15-12:45 – Panel Session G
G1 Dis/Trusting the Institutions of Conservatism and Reaction
Chair: Jeffrey Lawrence (Rutgers University)
Miriam Johnson (Oxford Brookes University), “The Business of Contradictions: The Political Economy of the Modern Publishing Industry”
Lee Konstantinou (University of Maryland), “From Creator to Sovereign: Dave Sim’s Cerebus, Institutional Critique, and the Rise of Neo-Reaction”
Rhona Jamieson (University College Dublin), “Institutions vs. the Future: From the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit to Neoreaction”
G2 Archives and Institutions of In/Exclusion
Chair: Charlotte Terrell (King’s College London)
Rachel Ann Walsh (Bowling Green State University), “‘and the house has been wicked for so long’: Reading the Archives of Eve L. Ewing’s 1919 and Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure in the Age of Backlash”
Aaron Benedetti (University of California, Davis), “Queer/Trans Community Archives in Crisis Times”
Jan Maramot (University of California, Irvine), “Can Queer Readings and Traditions Be Trusted?”
12:45-13:45 – Lunch Break
13:45-14:45 – Concluding Roundtable
Sarah Brouillette, Simone Murray, Christopher Newfield