29 January 2025
10:00-11:00 Keynote Address:
“Make humanity a multiplanet species!”: (Multi)planetarity in North
American Astroculture
Dr. Jens Temmen
11:00 – 11:15 Coffee Break
11:15 – 11:35 A Murderbot Manifesto: Anthropocentrism, Marginalised Voices, and
Rethinking Space Exploration through the Murderbot Diaries
Liane Scharf
11:40 – 12:00 Colonizing the Stars: Interstellar and the Reproduction of the
Frontier Myth
Maxine Broich
12:05 – 12:25 “Interstellar navigation is ‘easy-peasy’?”: The Blackboxing Narrative of
Space Exploration in Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary
Julie Bøglund Strand
12:25 – 13:25 Lunch Break
13:25 – 13:45 Black Holes and Pomegranates: Black Boxes in Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe
Öznur Özdal
13:50 – 14;10 You can’t run or hide: AI in the horror-survival Video Game Alien:
Isolation
Jaqueline Palm
14:15 – 14:35 The Black Box of Memory: Exploring Trauma in Inception
Valeriia Honcharuk
14:35 – 14:50 Coffee Break
14:50 – 15:10 Behind the Screen: Precarious Digital Labor in Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe
Polina Yakubivska
15:15 – 15:35 From Experience to Innocence: Scrooge’s Blakean Transformation in A
Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Ömer Faruk Ayma
15:40 – 16:00 Musical Coda
Song: Sea Fever (poem by John Maseeld/music by John Ireland)
Vocals: Ingo Plag (Baritone)
Piano: Luca Schulte-Kellinghaus
30 January 2025
10:00 – 10:20 Reading:
Synaesthesia at the Seaside: Constructing (Auto)Fictional Selves
through Sensory Entanglements
Dr. Helen Palmer
10:25 – 10:45 Autotheory as “Dicktation:” Sexuality and Identity Formation in
Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick
Alican Nazik
10:50 – 11:10 The Politics of Self-Formation and Media Materiality in I Love Dick
by Chris Kraus
Gulnara Tilekbaeva
11:10 – 11:25 Coffee Break
11:25 – 11:45 Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” as a Song of Hope
Arda Aydin
11:50 – 12:10 The Poet As Singer: The archetypal poet Orpheus in Robert
Browning’s Pippa Passes
Melissa Teschen
12:15 – 12:35 Beyond the Sculptor’s Gaze: Reinterpreting Kant on Beauty and
Control in Madeline Miller’s Galatea
Gizem Derebek
12:35 – 13:35 Lunch Break
13:35 – 13:55 “An endless novel which will drive everybody mad.” – The performative
Genius of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch
Lara Wenisch
14:00 – 14:20 Theatre of Cruelty: Antonin Artaud’s Vision of Theatre in
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
Alice Gehrmann
14:25 – 14:45 Reclaiming Biafra: Historiographic Metaction and the Nigerian Civil
War in Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and “Civil
Peace” by Chinua Achebe
Valeska Ridzewski
14:45 – 15:00 Coffee Break
15:00 – 15:20 Fragments of Memory: Narrating Trauma and Marginalized Voices in
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Helon Habila’s
Measuring Time
Rojda Taş
15:25 – 15:45 Digital Archives: Reshaping Memory and Resistance in Post-Colonial
Trauma
Basant Abdelaal
15:50 – 16:10 Allegorical Realism in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees
Angela Völker
16:15 – 16:35 Digital Intimacies: The Online Diary Form and Class/Gender
Dynamics in “Confessions of a Sugar Baby”
Fatemeh Ehsanpour
31 January 2025
10:00 – 11:00 Keynote Address:
Gendered Realities: How Language Encodes Bias and Reects
Society’s Stereotypes
Dr. Dominic Schmitz
11:00 – 11:15 Coffee Break
11:15 – 11:35 “We Propose That Genre Be the Key”: The Role of Text Type in the
Evolution of the Mandative Subjunctive
Ricarda Bortfeldt
11:40 – 12:00 Utilization of Diabetes as a Metaphor for Postcolonial Shame in
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift
Ece Kurtuldu
12:05 – 12:25 Between Worlds: Translated Beings in Abdulrazzak Gurnah’s The
Last Gift
Dilara Kahveci
12:25 -13:25 Lunch Break
13:25 – 13:45 Extinctions in Beowulf
Jacob Flor
13:50 – 14:10 Violence and Sainthood: Depictions of Saint Guthlac as a Miles Christi
Lisa-Marie Schmitz
14:15 – 14:35 Translations of Guthlac: Comparing Different Versions of Guthlac’s
Life through an Ecocritical and Postcolonial Lens
Luca Schulte-Kellinghaus
14:35 – 14:50 Coffee Break
14:50 – 15:10 Articial Elegance vs. Timeless Beauty: Comparing ChatGPT’s Poetry
to Shakespeare and Beyond
Muhammad Essam
15:15 – 15:35 From Rejection to Recognition: The Canonization of Lolita
Mohammadreza Dabirnia
15:40 – 16:00 Through Brodsky’s Glasses: Can English Words Be Beautiful?
Arezou Rahmati