COLL VALE: « Living Things »
Colloque international: « Living Matters »
Organisateurs: Thomas Constantinesco, Anne-Valérie Dulac et Charlotte Ribeyrol, avec le soutien de Stella Granier, Gabriel Saada et Anna Shmatenko
Salle des Actes, Sorbonne Université
9 April 2026
8:45-9:00: Opening
9:00-10:30: Panel 1: The Matter of Sight and Sound
Elitza Koeva (Sorbonne Université): Symbiotic Resonances: Sounding More-Than-Human Worlds
Maëlle Nagot (Université Paris Cité / University of Surrey): Flowers, Boxes, and the Absent Self: The Life of Things in Katherine Mansfield’s Doodles
Kendra Drischler Attnäs (Lycée Stanislas): Living Landscapes in California Poetry: Coolbrith, Sterling, Jeffers
10:30-11:00: coffee break
11:00-12:30: Panel 2: Matter and Form
Lisa Anki (Collège Bel Air, Meudon): “To be alive — is Power —”: Emily Dickinson’s ‘Epigenesist Poetics’
Neela Cathelain (Sorbonne Université): Lifeforms and Formless Matter: Unthinking Mastery in Jeff VanderMeer and Amitav Ghosh
Françoise Sammarcelli (Sorbonne Université): Of lice and words: Ascension by Steve Tomasula – or fiction, nature, and (trans)formation
12:30-13:30: Lunch
13:30-15:00: Panel 3: Life / Death
Gabriel Saada (Sorbonne Université): “Never dead but living in the new”: questions of immortality in William Morris’s prose romances
Anna Shmatenko (Sorbonne Université): Dissection Wounds: The Liveliness of Cadaverous Flesh in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Emma Frigo (Université Grenoble Alpes / Université Paris Nanterre): “A pullulating cadaver”: Henry Miller’s aesthetics of decay
15:00-15:30: Coffee break
15:30-17:00: Panel 4: Domestic Materialities
Ludovic Le Saux (CPGE, VALE): Clearing the Victorian cobwebs: dust, spiders and the art of cleanliness
Lisa Bognenko (Université Paris Cité / Sorbonne Université): Sewing Ideas: Weaving Text and Textile with Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Marie Bouchet (Université de Toulouse): Nabokov’s Poethics of Mundane Matter: Caring for Things
17:30-18:30: Performance by Tom Payne (Sheffield Hallam University) – to be confirmed
10 April 2026
9:00-10:30: Panel 5: Water and Trees
Armelle Sabatier (Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas): The Ecology of Colours: Performing Water Polychromy and States of Matter on the Jacobean Stage
Sophie Elzière (INALCO): Water Mesh and Pollen Light: The Vibrant Matters of Ted Hughes’s River
Héloïse Lecomte (Sorbonne Université): The Tree of (Living) Memory: Metabolising Loss in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees (2021)
10:30-11:00 coffee break
11:00-12:00: Keynote: Farah Karim-Cooper (Folger Shakespeare Library)
12:00-13:30: Lunch
13:30-15:00: Panel 6: From Romantic to Modernist Ecologies
Camille Adnot (ENS Ulm): From Sensibility to Animacy: Non-human Sympathies in Wollstonecraft’s Letters
Stella Granier (Sorbonne Université): Ruskin’s lively materials: rusted iron and the continuum of inorganic matter
Nina Milonet (Université de Lille): “re-peating yourself”: A History of Peat in James Joyce’s Ecology
15:00-15:30: Coffee break
15:30-17:00: Panel 7: Speculative Fictions
Pheobe Chetwynd (CY Cergy Paris Université): Meat Futures: (De)Naturalising Anthropocentrism in Contemporary Science Fiction
Moura El Fahli (ENSAM, Université Mohammed V, Rabat–Agdal): Vegetal Intelligence and Vital Materialism in Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Sue Burke’s Semiosis Trilogy
Seray Dizard (Istanbul University): Chaos/Complexity and Posthuman Ecology in Torrey Peters’s Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones
17:00-17:15: Break
17:15-18:45: Panel 8: From Vitality to Virality
Maya Haidar (University of Cambridge): Colonial Vitalities in Domestic Manuals for Imperial Women (1880-1910)
Rim Makni-Bejar (Université Evry Paris-Saclay): Vital/Viral Matter: HIV/AIDS, Death and the Female Body in South African Women’s Writing
Katia Marcellin (Université de Perpignan): Breathing Matters: Viruses and Contagious Vulnerabilities in Pandemic Fiction
18:30-19:30: Cocktail