Survival: Welcome
Welcome to the webpage of Survival, the University of Toronto’s 25th annual graduate conference. Conference information and information about the city of Toronto will be posted shortly. In the meantime, we invite you to read our call for papers (link above) and submit an abstract (link below).
Our keynote speakers this year will be Christopher Fynsk, Elizabeth Rottenberg and Eric Cazdyn (titles of talks to be announced).
Christopher Fynsk is a Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen. He has translated works by Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Maurice Blanchot. Fynsk’s work is closely involved with the writings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Lévinas, and several contemporary artists. In his critical studies, which breach the barriers separating philosophy, literary theory, and art criticism, Fynsk is deeply engaged with the question of the possibility of language and how the human relation to Being is sketched out through literary and philosophical texts and art works. He is the author of Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (Fordham, 2013), The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minnesota, 2004), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford, 2000), Language and Relation: …that there is language (Stanford, 1996), and Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Cornell, 1986).
Elizabeth Rottenberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Comparative Literature Program at DePaul University. She received her PhD at The Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University and has studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, Germany. She is the author of Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert and has translated books by Lyotard, Derrida, and Blanchot. She is the editor and translator of Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews (1971-2001) by Jacques Derrida (Stanford, 2001) as well as the co-editor (with Peggy Kamuf) of the two-volume edition of Jacques Derrida’s Psyche: Inventions of the Other (Stanford, 2007/2008). She has published many articles on themes in late modern and contemporary philosophy as well as in psychoanalysis in journals such as Kant-Studien, Philosophy Today, Mosaic, MLN, and theory@buffalo. She is currently a candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Eric Cazdyn, our Linda Hutcheon and J. Edward Chamberlin Speaker this year, is Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His publications include The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness (Duke, 2011), Something’s Missing: Seven Theses after Globalization (Blackwell, 2011, with Imre Szeman) and Trespasses: Selected Writing of Masao Miyoshi (Duke, 2010).
We hope to see you soon!
Survival 2015 Conference Committee: Baharak Beizaei, Keegan Goodman, Natasha Hay, Irina Sadovina, Fan Wu
