Program-60
Legacies: Nostalgia, Adaptation, and Reimaginings
Conference Schedule (UTC-7) PDT
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Session 1, 9:30-10:45 am
Panel 1: Deceit and Plausibility in Strategies of Literary Discourse
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator:
Zoom Captain:
Dr. Melanie Swan (University College London): The Future of the Past: Literary Remix as a Legacy of Resistance
Dr. Paul Cahill (Pomona College): (Re)membering the Baroque in Manuel Mantero’s Poemas exclusivos
Dr. Donna Nicol (CSULB): What We Build from Fragments: Ethics, Imagination, and Historical Responsibility.
Syeda Azhar (Air University, Islamabad; UC Santa Barbara): Reading Lahore as Urban Text: Cognitive Mapping and Social Surveillance in In the Company of Strangers (2019)
Panel 2: Through time and trauma: Moving toward the postcolonial
Location: AS-125, Zoom link
Moderator:
Zoom Captain:
Jolee Estrada (CSULB): “Our bodies, our territories”: Discovering Cuerpo-Territorio in Anna Burns’ Milkman
Tsavia Jack (CSULB): Telling Our Own Stories: Natives' Survival Through Literature
Michael Barry (Boston University): “Prophecy and Pregnancy”: Revolutionary Disappointment and Decolonial Futurity in The Colour of Forgetting
Session 2: 11-12:15 pm
Panel 3: Whom Does Legacy Serve?: Reading and Remembering Christa Wolf For Our Sake
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator: Itzel Benitez (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
Dr. Robert Blankenship (CSULB): Working Literature: Clemens Meyer, Christa Wolf, and the Legacy of the Bitterfelder Weg
Emery Pham (CSULB) and Lani Chavez (CSULB): The Perversion of War as Glory: Christa Wolf’s Critique of Masculine Nostalgia
Kevin P. Eubanks (US Naval War College): Being-there: Heidegger, Wolf, and Literature as Care
Panel 4: Disability studies and health humanities: reclaiming one's body and identity
Location: AS-125, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Crystal Lie (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
Jade Saffery (CSULB): “Now, have you ever admired your body in a mirror?”: Reflecting (on) Monstered and/or Marginalized Bodies in Oreo through its Parallels to the Theseus Myth
Jessica King (CUNY): The Legacy of My Body and its Literature: Transforming a Health Diary into an Autoethnography
Alexandria Morales (CSULB): Civilization and Its Malcontents: Mad Resistance to Doctored Identity in Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: a Headcase
Zack Medway (CSULB): Blood and Bowels: A Comparative Study of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Dante’s Inferno
Session 3: 12:30-1:45 pm
Panel 5: Rewriting Ableist Legacies: Intersectional Interdisciplinary Student Interventions
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Crystal Lie (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
Akira Carey (CSULB): Mapping Illness Beyond the Body: Audre Lorde, GIS, and the Spatial Legacies of Cancer
Kai Dababneh (CSULB): Graphic Reimagining of Transgender Arab Identity
Chloe Fujii (CSULB): The Courage to Look Back: Autoethnography, Adolescence, and the Afterlives of Illness Metaphor
Karen Tran (CSULB): A New Age of Representation: Exploring the Disabled, Asian Experience in Modern Media
Panel 6: Raising the Dead: The Ontology of Resurrection
Location: AS-125, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Jeffrey High (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
Kimberly Wong (CSULB): Fear in a Handful of Dust: Intertextuality in R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis
Katharine Fullerton (Scripps College): Breeding Lilacs Out of the Dead: Tradition, Time, and Renewal in T.S. Eliot
Fiona Eustace (CSULB): Say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth - Do You Also Doubt Your God? Ontological Rebellion in Emily Dickinson
Session 4: 2-3:15 pm
Keynote 1
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator: Amy DeSuza (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
David F. Walker (Portland University): On the Offensive: Reimagining Classic Literature Through the Graphic Novel
Session 5: 3:30-4:45 pm
Panel 7: Re-evaluating the legacy of the ancient past
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator: Amy DeSuza (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
Aurora Dorsett (CSULB): Legacies of Oppression and Empowerment: The Duality of Euripides’ Medea
Parker Ripley Ryane Ward (CSULB): Even a Goddess: Continued Female Erasure and Subjugation in Adaptations and Teachings of Homeric Hymn “To Demeter”
Logan Becker (CSULB): The Odyssey through a Modern Lens
Nicholas Perez (CSULB): Inheriting a Prophecy: The Skywalker Legacy
Panel 8: The legacy of colonialism
Location: AS-125, Zoom link
Moderator:
Zoom Captain:
Emeer Hassanpour (UCLA): Permanent Fanonism: The Colonized Algeria in the Novel Tomorrow is a New Day
Dr. Amir Sharifi (CSULB) and Dr. Ali Ashouri (SDSU): Nostalgia and Memory
Session 6: 5:30-6:30 pm
Comparative World Literature and Classics Graduation Party
Location: Anatol Center Patio, AS-120
Thursday, April 23, 2026
Session 7, 9:30-10:45 am
Panel 9: Tall Tales, Villains, Heroes and Superheroes
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator:
Zoom Captain:
Dr. José Rodriguez (CSULB): Legacies of the Unkillable: Ethical Cognizance and the Deadpool Trilogy as Nostalgic Reimagining
Wendy Abrego-Mrianda (Fresno State University): A Contemporary Heroic Failure: Examining Odysseus’s Modern Heroic Shortcomings in Homer’s The Odyssey
Inu Uong (CSULB): The deception that underlies Aesop's Fables
Norma Frias (CSULB): Drawing Outside the Lines: Redefining Gender and Femininity Through Visual Narratives in Princess Jellyfish and Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow
Panel 10: Genre's Legacy, Present, and Future
Location: AS-125, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Viola Lasmana (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
Roundtable with Alyssa Agudelo, Kaitlyn Langford, Jorge Alas, Aiden Jackson, Emily Trejo, Leslie Villamil, Levon Parseghian
Session 8: 11-12:15 pm
Panel 11: The Contemporary Echo of Transnational Women Writers 1800 to the Present
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Clorinda Donato (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
Hilary Stern (CSULB): Genere, Filantropia e Transnazionalismo: Il Caso di Teresa Filangieri Ravaschieri
Michael Fahy (CSULB): The Destiny of a Woman of Genius: Legacies as Inspiration in Madame de Staël’s Corinne (1807) and George Sand’s Consuelo (1842)
Lyn Embree (CSULB): Becoming “One of the Greats”: Female Genius and the Reimagining of Literary Legacy Across Two Centuries
Alessandra Balzani (CSULB and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya): Across the Color Line: Colonial Rome and the Postcolonial Present in Igiaba Scego’s La Linea del Colore
Panel 12: Theorizing Stereotypical Frameworks in Digital Worlds
Location: AS-125, Zoom link
Moderator:
Zoom Captain:
John Ripetoe (CSULB) & David Hiroki Herrero (CSULB): Genuine Character or Caricature? Navigating Racial Representation in Gaming
Nathan Bay (CSULB): Representation of Autism Spectrum Disorder in Video Games through the Character River Wyles from To The Moon
Olly Tetrault (CSULB): The Underworld of Over the Garden Wall and Ultrakill: Dante's Inferno in the Twenty-First Century
Session 9: 12:30-1:45 pm
Panel 13: The Gender of Violence and Legacies of Kinship
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator:
Zoom Captain:
Carlos Diaz (Texas Tech University): The Spectral in Lone Women—Grappling with Haunting Legacies and Redemption Through Solidarity
Adriana Lopez (CSULB): Why Women Kill: How Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer Reinvents the Femme Fatale
Kaitlyn Langford (CSULB): Medea Unbound: Victimhood, Villainy, and Female Agency in Euripides’ Medea and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women
Lesley Gouger (CSULB): The Future of Families: An examination of alternative family units as seen in science-fiction and speculative fiction
Panel 14: Estranged Returns-Histories of the Future
Location: AS-125, Zoom link
Moderator:
Zoom Captain:
Selena Torres (CSULA): The "Sinking World" of Commodity Fetishism: The Social, Environmental, and "Nonhuman” Destruction in Rina Sawayama’s “XS” (2020)
Tzarina Sophia Ramos Zapata (CSULB): “Tell Them This is My Home”: Anticipatory Nostalgia in Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
Daniel McKay (New Mexico Military Institute): Crouching Tiger, Hidden Heritage: Reading the Miniature in Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie”
Olivia Hakey (CSULB): With “Sedulous Pursuit”: Exploring Legacies of Gendered Resistance in The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832)
Session 10: 2-3:15 pm
Keynote 2
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Kathryn Chew (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
Dr. Karen Tei Yamashita (UCSC): Questions 27 & 28
Session 11: 3:30-4:45 pm
Workshop 15: Through the Eyes of the Other: Embodied Activism via Reimagined Texts
Location: Anatol Center, AS-119, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Raven Pfister (CSULB)
Zoom Captain:
Dr. Raven Pfister, Zakiya Atkinson
Friday, April 24, 2026
Session 12: 9:30-10:45 am
Panel 16: Feminism, Memory, and Transformation
Location: Zoom, Zoom link
Moderator:
Zoom Captain:
Dr. Irina Rabinovich (Holon Institute of Technology, Israel): Between Memory and Madness: The Legacy of Nostalgia in Rose Gollup-Cohen’s Autobiographical Writing
Thao Vu (Virginia Tech): Death by Water and Ōe Kenzaburō’s Unheralded Feminist Rotation
Dr. Maria Chan (Hong Kong Shue Yan University): Re-voicing the Mermaid: From Silence to Song
Mackenzie Patterson (Boston University): Demythologizing Feminist Legacies: Race, Myth, and Speculative Futures
Session 13: 11-12:15 pm
Panel 17: The Legacies of Narratives, the Narrative of Legacy
Location: Zoom, Zoom link
Moderator:
Zoom Captain:
Francesco Rossetti (University of Milan): Nostalgia for Utopia, Reimagined: Armenian Children’s Songs in Venice
Dr. John Bessai (Independent Scholar): Legacy Systems, Living Texts: Platform Succession and the Afterlives of NFB Interactive Storytelling
Dr. Mihaela Precup (University of Bucharest): Spaces of Nostalgia and Social Critique in My Golden Age I and II by Daniel Horia
Ritika Suryavanshi (Independent Scholar): From Silence to Solidarity: Translating East Asian Women's Voices from the Margins to Global Feminist Discourse
Session 14: 12:30-1:45 pm
Panel 18: Reclamations
Location: Zoom, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Katherine McLoone
Zoom Captain:
Dr. Sarah Zahed (Westfield State University): Column as Counter Archive: Legacy, Liminality, and Erasure in Sayed Kashua’s Native
Hessam Abedini (University of Oregon): Halitosis and Inheritance: Narrative Technologies of Genealogical Reclamation in Tarsusi’s Darabnameh
S. Aiswarya (Vellore Institute of Technology, India) & Dr. Saraswathy Selvarajan (Vellore Institute of Technology, India): Tracing settler colonial shadows through Indigenous futurism in Darcie Little Badger’s novels
Session 15: 2-3:15 pm
Panel 19: The Anthropocene and Beyond
Location: Zoom, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Katherine McLoone
Zoom Captain:
Dr. Inna Häkkinen (University of Helsinki): Solastalgic Landscape: Botanical Agency in post-Chernobyl Toxic Narrative
Dr. Antonella De Blasio (Università eCampus, Italy): Inhabiting Legacy: Ecological Imagination
Dr. Mohammed Shafeer (Independent Researcher): From Patriotism to the Legacy of Gandhian Nationalism: Evolution of Hyper Nationalism and Hegemony of the Right Wing in India
Dr. Thakurdas Jana (Indus University, India) & Dr. Ritendra Sharma (Indus University, India): Becoming A Human-Animal: Revisiting the Therianthropes in Indian Mythology
Session 16: 3:30-4:45 pm
Panel 20: Legacies of Violence and Power
Location: Zoom, Zoom link
Moderator: Dr. Katherine McLoone
Zoom Captain:
Jesse S. Cohn (Purdue University Northwest): "Everything was wrong”: Postnormal historicity in three science fiction novels of the early postfascist period
Adrián Arana-Armesto (University of the Basque Country): Riding the Ruins: Nostalgia, Violence, and the Vanishing Frontier in McCarthy and McMurtry
Zhu Yanchang (Zhejiang Normal University): Recapitulating the Industrial Revolution: Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island as a Didactic Epic of Applied Science
Scott Ennis (Independent scholar and poet): From Urizen to the Anunnaki: Romantic Myth and the Reimagining of Ancient Authority
