Friday 25th March 

Registration: 9.00 - 10.45

Welcome:10.55

Session 1: 11.00-1.00  

Plenary: Apocalypse        Debating Chamber

Karen Edwards (Exeter)
'John Milton: Apocalypse and Toleration' 

Christopher Rowland (Oxford)
'"The Beast & the Whore rule without controls": William Blake and the Book of Revelation' 

John Hall (UC Davis)
'Dispensations of the Apocalyptic'  

1.00-2.15 Lunch  

Session 2: 2.15-3.55     

2.1 Death      Debating Chamber

Melanie Adley (Pennsylvania)
'There's a Future in Dying: Female Fragility and Passive Defiance in fin-de-siècle Vienna' 

Simone Schroth (UCD)
'"Your life must now run the course that's been set for it": Health and Healthcare in Three Recent Dystopias' 

John Troyer (Bath)
'Death without Limits and Living without Ends: The Anachronism of Dying'  

2.2 Dystopian Horizons       Pemberton 20

Adam Stock (Durham)
'Doom and Gloom, or "England's Dreaming?": Apocalypse and Dystopia in Mid-Twentieth-Century English Fiction' 

Pieter Vermeulen (Ghent)
'Trauma, Loss, and The Recovery of the Future in Freud and in Dystopian Noir Fiction' 

Iain Robinson (UEA)
'Postmodernity, the Future, and the Dystopian Imagination'  

3.55-4.15 Coffee  

Session 3: 4.15-5.45 

Keynote Address       Debating Chamber

Patricia Waugh (Durham)

Saturday 26th March 

Session 4: 9.00-11.00 

Plenary: Lenin and Futurity        Debating Chamber

Alastair Renfrew (Durham)
'Two Songs of Lenin' 

Sean Grattan (Queen's, CUNY)
'Lenin, Prosopopeia, and Politics to Come' 

Peter Hitchcock (Graduate Center, CUNY)
'The Leninist Hypothesis' 

11.00-11.20 Coffee 

Session 5: 11.20-1.00 

5.1 Gendered Futures          Debating Chamber

Alexis Lothian (Southern California)
'The History of No Future: Reproductive Deviance and the Politics of Futurelessness in Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night' 

Elizabeth Russell (Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona)
'Gender Crime and Futures without Women'  

Caitríona Ní Dhúill (Durham)
'Futures Desired, Future Desires'

5.2 Apocalypse Now and Then        Pemberton 20

Helen Van Noorden (Cambridge)
'Seneca and Images of World-End' 

Michal Oklot (Brown)
'Apocalypse as Event: The Cosmological Perspective of Vasilii Rozanov (and D.H. Lawrence)

Nicholas Rush-Cooper (Durham)
'Experiencing the Post-Apocalyptic Future Now: The Chernobyl Zone of Alienation' 

1.00-2.15 Lunch 

Session 6: 2.15-3.55 

6.1 European Futures       Debating Chamber

Martin Hurcombe (Bristol)
'Forever Delayed? Utopia, the French Revolutionary Left and the Spanish Civil War'  

Laura Horn (VU, Amsterdam)
'Utopia Lost? Representations of European Union' 

Jenny Andersson (Sciences Po, Paris)
'The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for a New World: Constructing Futures Studies as a Field of Human Action, 1967-1972' 

6.2 Foreclosure          Pemberton 20

Ryan Trimm (Rhode Island)
'The Given as Foreclosure in Marion, Derrida and Nancy' 

Matthew Charles (Middlesex)
'The Future is History: Dreams of Catastrophe in Bloch and Benjamin' 

Henk de Berg (Sheffield)
'In Defence of Won Causes' 

3.55-4.15 Coffee 

Session 7: 4.15-5.45     

Keynote Address            Debating Chamber

Mikhail Epstein (Emory)

Sunday 27th March 

Session 8: 9.00-11.00 

Plenary: Eco-criticism to Ecotopia        Debating Chamber

Lucy Sargisson (Nottingham)
'The End of the World as We Know It? Post-Catastrophic Climate Change Dystopias' 

Oliver Smith (St Andrews)
'The Hermeneutics of Apocalypse: Prophecy as Eco-Criticism' 

Richard Howells (King's, London)
'Beyond Bloch: Creation, Creativity and a Utopian Theory of Design'

Lisa Garforth (Newcastle)
'No Nature, No Future? Environmental Utopias after the End' 

11.00-11.20 Coffee 

Session 9: 11.20-1.00 

9.1 When the Future Resembled the Past        Debating Chamber

Jonathan Sachs (Concordia, Montreal)
'Future! Decline' 

Kevin Inston (UCL)
'Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality: A History of the Present' 

Sanja Perovic (King's, London)
'Year One of the French Revolution: A Future that Never Passed'  

1.00-2.15 Lunch 

10.1 Faith in the Future        Debating Chamber

Brian Sudlow (Reading)
'René Girard's Apocalypse' 

Seline Reinhardt (Berne)
'The Religious Dimension of the Climactically Changed Future' 

Catherine Moir (Sheffield)
'The Future as Heimat: The Dialectics of Secularisation and the Journey to the Promised Land'

10.2 Before and after Modernity          Pemberton 20

Lucas Wood (Pennsylvania)
'"Fragments around a Nothing": The Photography of History in Kracauer's Anteroom' 

Alex Sutton (Warwick)
'Open Marxism, Utopia and Totality' 

Stefano Cracolici (Durham)
'Anti-Modernity: Pius IX and The Future in the Catacombs' 

3.55-4.15 Coffee 

Session 11: 4.15-5.45 

Keynote Address           Debating Chamber

Jean-Michel Rabaté (Pennsylvania)