09.15 – 10.15 Registration
10.15 – 10.30 Introduction and Welcome by Professor Regenia Gagnier (University of Exeter)
10.30 – 11.30 Keynote by Professor Scott Wilson (Kingston, University of London) ‘Sonic Violence and the Three Delusions of Reconciliation’
11.30 – 11.50 Tea and Coffee
11.50 – 13.20 Parallel Panels I: Art, Text and Violence; Towards Reconciliation in Africa; Echoes of the Holocaust
13.20 – 14.20 Lunch
14.20 – 15.35 Parallel Panels II: Violent Perspectives; Frames of War; Violence and Reconciliation
15.35 – 15.50 Tea and Coffee
15.50 – 17.05 Parallel Panels III: Alain Badiou; Walter Benjamin; The Politics and Praxis of Violence
17.05 – 17.45 Roundtable plenary with Professor Scott Wilson, Professor Regenia Gagnier and others.
17.45 – 18.15 Violence Now: a performance by James King
17.45 – 19.00 Wine Reception
19.00 Close

Parallel Panels I: 11.50 – 13.20
Room 1: Art, Text and Violence
Chair: Lara Cox
Dr Eva Aldea: “The dark style that is connected to his disturbed and contentious temperament” (Bellori, 1672): Caravaggio and The Violent Event (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Catriona McAra: Sadeian Women: Violence in the Surrealist Anti-tales of Carrington, Carter and Tanning (University of Glasgow)
Natalia Font: The Bloody Museum (University of Exeter)

Room 2: Towards Reconciliation in Africa
Chair: Sam Goodman
Dr Emile Bojesen: Inferno: Metaphysical Violence and Ideological Brutality in Nuruddin Farah’s Links (University of Winchester)
Rebecca Ashworth: When Violence is Reconciliation (University of Reading)
Zachary Lamdin: Towards a Theatre of Political Reconciliation (Birkbeck, University of London)

Room 3: Echoes of the Holocaust
Chair: Paul Young
Dr Martin Randall: “But I don’t think it is necessary to continue the description”: The Representation of the Babi Yar Massacre in DM Thomas’ The White Hotel and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (University of Cheltenham and Gloucester)
Gregory Herman: Poetry, Guilt and Living after Auschwitz: Primo Levi and the Impossibility of Reconciliation (University of Aberdeen)
Katherine Guinness: Domestic Violence: German National Identity and Rosemarie Trockel’s Hasskappen (University of Manchester)

Parallel Panels II: 14.20 – 15.35
Room 1: Violent Perspectives: Cinema, Feminism, Gaze
Chair: Catriona McAra
Dr Zoe Brigley and Dr Sorcha Gunne: Breaking the Bonds of Domination: Subverting the Rape Script in Short Stories by Isabel Allende and Rosario Castellanos (Universities of Warwick and Northampton)
Andrew Hennlich: Amnesty with a Movie Camera: William Kentridge’s Ubu Tells the Truth (University of Manchester)
Xavier Reyes: ‘Kill with Me?’: Contemporary Horror and the Mediation of Violence (University of Lancaster)

Room 2: Frames of War
Chair: Kate Hext
Daniel O’Gorman: War of Frames: Violence and Empathy in Dave Eggers’ What is the What (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Anna Henderson: Bayeux and its Heirs: Narrative Assimilation? (University of Manchester)
Dani Mortimer: “Looking for just a Second into the Spectacleless”: Challenging the Spectacle of Violence (University of Essex)

Room 3: Violence and Reconciliation
Chair: Sam Goodman
Brian Nail: Bad Medicine – Good Poison: Sacrifice, Revolution, and the Absurd in the Work of Lu Xun (University of Glasgow)
Robert Jackson: Violence, Security and Metaphysics: Reframing the Politics of Security (University of Plymouth)
Paul Whitehouse: Seeing Red: Violence and Native American Cultural Identity in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded (University of Warwick)

Parallel Panels III: 15.50 – 17.05
Room 1: Alain Badiou
Chair: Graham Matthews
Dr Catherine Humble: Unsaid Violence: The Silence of Destruction in Raymond Carver (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Claudio Murgia: The Suicide of a Postmodernist: Truth and Language in David Foster Wallace and Alain Badiou (University of Warwick)
Robert Crich: Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek on Systemic Forms of Violence (University of Cardiff)

Room 2: Walter Benjamin
Chair: Anthony Fothergill
Dr Georgina Colby: Slavoj Žižek, the Politics of Violence and Contemporary Literature (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Taihei Hanada: The Problem of Labour in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ (University of Exeter)
Aude de Caunes: Cultural Resistance and Symbolic Appropriation in Musical Practices of Contemporary French Postcolonial Communities: Critical Theory as Interpretative Violence?

Room 3: The Politics and Praxis of Violence
Chair: Paul Williams
Dr Robert Lawson: Orientations towards Violence among Adolescent Glaswegian Males (Birmingham City University)
Dr Stephanie Lehner: Transformative Aesthetics? The Performative Politics of Reconciliation in Recent Northern Irish Drama (UCD John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies)
Ainhoa Montoya: The Re-Enactment of War during El Salvador’s Post-War Elections (University of Manchester)