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
Sarah Brouillette (Carleton University), “Reading Platforms: Care and Crisis in Contemporary Publishing”
10:45-11:15 – Coffee Break
11:15-12:45 – Panel Session A
A1 Crisis and the Institution(s) of Literature
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 the Institutionalists”
A2 Dis/Trusting the Numbers
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”
A3 Dis/Trusting the Institutions of Translation
Joana Roqué Pesquer (KU Leuven), “Pockets of Resistance?: Independent Presses, Rhetorics of Translation, and the Subversion of Marketed Inclusivity”
Ioana Moroșan (G. Călinescu Institute), “‘Does Romanian Literature Exist Beyond Berlin?’ The Role of the Literary Festival in the Internationalization of Romanian Writers”
Miaïna Razakamanantsoa (University of Münster), “Institutions Dis/trusting Institutions: Power Dynamics Between Literary and Judicial Bodies in the Global Marketing of Translated Literature”
12:45-13:45 – Lunch Break
13:45-15:15 – Panel Session B
B1 Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Irish Literature
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 Para-Institutions of Literary Production
Tim Sommer (University of Munich), “Postwar Fiction and the Modern Archive: Institutional and Literary Histories”
Kathryn Roberts (University of Groningen), “Reading for Utopia: The Residency as Literary and Social Form”
Sara Dahlberg (Lund University), “‘But ours was a community of doubt’: Disappointment and Distrust in the C21st Academic Novel”
B3 Dis/Trusting the Institutions of Poetry
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 (Northeastern University), “Abstraction as Luxury: Poetry and the University’s Geography of Dis/placement”
15:15-15:45 – Coffee Break
15:45-17:15 – Panel Session C
C1 Dis/Trusting Critical Method
Henry Ivry (University of Glasgow), “Infrastructuring Critique and the Limits of the University”
Ben Davies (University of Portsmouth), “Critical Reading and the Fantasy of Method”
Claire Squires (University of Stirling), “BOOK AC(ademia)”
C2 Dis/Trusting Global Literary Institutions
Gaurav Desai (University of Michigan) & Stéphane Robolin (Rutgers University), “The Institutions of African Literature, 1945-2010”
Katerina Pavlidi (University College Dublin), “Absent Futures, Alternative Presents: The Redistribution of Institutional Trust in Late Soviet Culture and its Contemporary Legacies”
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”
C3 Contemporary Fictions of Institutional Dis/Trust
Suganya Vijayabaskaran (Central University of Tamil Nadu), “Between Truth and Betrayal: Trust as a Social System in Anne Enright’s The Gathering”
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’
Thursday 19th June 2025
(LexIcon Library, Dun Laoghaire)
09.30-10.45 – Keynote Lecture
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
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 the Institution(s) of Publishing
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 Researcher), “Diversity and Distrust in the UK Publishing Industry: BPOC Workers’ Experience of Diversity Initiatives Through the Lens of Racial Capitalism”
D3 Dis/Trusting the Institutions of Reading
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”
12:45-13:45 – Lunch Break
13:45-15:15 – Panel Session E
E1 Critique, the University, and Contemporary Writing
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 Literary Institutions of the Postwar
Greg Barnhisel (Duquesne University), “How Norman Pearson Made Yale the Center of Modern Literary Study”
Niklas Gödde (University of Münster), “Trusting philanthropic-literary Institutions of the Cultural Cold War: U.S. Foundations and Postwar German-Language Literature”
John Greaney (Goethe University Frankfurt), “Contemporary Modernisms: The Reconstitution of Europe and the Renationalisation of the Avant-Garde”
E3 Authors and Institutions
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”
15:15-15:45 – Coffee Break
15:45-17:15 – Panel Session F
F1 Dis/Trusting Prize Culture
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 the Consecration of Something Like Radicalism Circa 2016”
F2 Dis/Trusting the Book Club
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 Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Indian Literature
Tias Basu (Jadavpur University), “Literary Institutions and National Integration: Trust, Control, and the Making of ‘Indian Literature’ in Post-Independence India (1954-1974)”
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”
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
Christopher Newfield (Independent Social Research Foundation), “The Future of Literary Knowledge in the Authoritarian West”
10:45-11:15 – Coffee Break
11:15-12:45 – Panel Session G
G1 Dis/Trusting the Institutions of Conservatism and Reaction
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 Dis/Trusting the Institutions of Racialization
James Baxter (Trinity College Dublin), “‘Amistad means friendship’: Random House and Paperbacking the ‘Black Aesthetic’”
Valentina López Liendo (University of Heidelberg), “‘She was only ever a token’ – Race-Making and Publishing in R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface”
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”
12:45-13:30 – Lunch Break
13:30-15:00 – Panel Session H
H1 Schooling and the Institutions of Literature
Owain Burrell (University of Warwick), “Teaching the Constitution: The Grammar School, Literature, and the British State”
Joseph Williams (University of East Anglia), “The Peri-Academic Reader in Postwar Britain”
Alexander Manshel (McGill University), “The Institution(s) of High School English”
H2 Queering the Institution(s) of Literature
Rob Hawkes (Teesside University), “‘I’ve got an unfortunate talent for figures’: Queering Literary and Monetary Genres in The Talented Mr Ripley”
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?”
15:00-16:00 – Concluding Roundtable
Sarah Brouillette, Simone Murray, Christopher Newfield