SEMSEMAs of May 28th, 2026
13:15-13:45 | Welcome and Registration | ||
13:45 | Conference opening | ||
14:00-15:00 | Keynote Rachel Potter: Libertine Modernism Chair: Charlotte Estrade | ||
15:00-15:15 | Break | ||
15:15-16:45 | Women, Sex and the Boundaries of Form/Genre Chair: Emma Frigo Leila Michelle Vaziri: ‘“The central point toward which life and death are spinning”: Pregnancy’s Forms in the Modernist Novel’ Kirsten MacLeod: ‘“Aged freaks are all the rage”: The élégante as Modernist Female Type‘ Stacy Gillis: ‘“A Work of a Tendency So Grossly Immoral”: Public Morals, Copyright, and Women’s Writing in the Early Twentieth Century’ | Magazines and book series Chair: Benoît Tadié Céline Mansanti: Sex and its suppression in the new US humor magazines of the 1920s Will Straw: Sexual content and form in New York’s sensational magazines of the 1920s Max Saunders: Modernist Sex To-day and To-morrow
| Against Sex Chair: Lacy Rumsey Fiorenzo Iuliano: “A more durable purity”: Jewish Sexuality and the Struggle for Americanness in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep Zakir Paul: “Modernist Erotophobia” Bérengère Riou: “turn from easy pleasure”: Resisting Sex in H.D.
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16:45-17:00 | Break | ||
17:00-18:30 | Transidentity and non-binary identity Chair: Chloé Thomas Jenny Scoones and Laura Ludtke: The Trouble with Tiresias: Reading for Glandular Discourse in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Sackville-West’s The Land (1926) Chris Coffman: Nonbinary Sexuality in Bryher’s “Hellenics” and “Myiskos” Jaime Hovey: Girl won and lost: sporting transmasculinity in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet | Colonial and Postcolonial sex Chair: Céline Mansanti Atim Mackin: (Pseudo-)Charting Colonial Sexualities: Docteur Jacobus’ Amour aux colonies (1893) Sean Mark: “[E]verybody look like they frustrated in the big city the sex life gone wild”: On Sex in The Lonely Londoners Justine Baillie: The Economy of Survival in Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight and Claude McKay’s Banjo
| Surveillance, censorship Chair: Zakir Paul Rose Ducharme: Sex, Surveillance, and the British Empire in Claude McKay’s Writings on Jamaica Andrew Thacker: “the spicy kind of books”: Sex and Censorship in the Modernist Bookshop Agata Ida Kozuchowska: Picturing the perverse: the surreal, the Bizarre and issues of censorship in John Willie’s vintage S/M erotica
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9:00-10:30 | Queerness (1) Chair: Henry Carmines Maurizia Boscagli: The Bed, and the Boat: Queer Sexuality in Djuna Barnes and Eileen Grey Regine Eurydike Hader: Modernist Dance Portraits as Queer and Gay Geometries Ian Jayne: “Serious pleasure”: Narrating Queer Sexuality in Maurice and Alec
| Maleness, masculinity, virility (1) Chair: Maïwenn-Iman Zekri Le Garff Fabio Colonnese: Kimberly Kotel: Space and Sexual Crowding in Miller’s Tropic of Cancer Emma Frigo: “A nice cunt sandwich”: Henry Miller’s alimentary and sexual hunger(s)
| Promiscuity and Secrecy Chair: Charlotte Estrade Philippe Birgy: Compromising promiscuity and entangling connexions in and around Rebecca West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony” Joseph Owen: Secrecy and Obscenity in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Rachel Haines: Schoolgirls in love: The Queer Desire to be Smart in Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia
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10:30-11:00 | Break | ||
11:00-12:30 | Queerness (2) Chair: Fiona Fleming Andrew Koenig: Isherwood, Hockney, and Gay (Post)modern(ist) Identity in LA. David Reckford: “I will always love you though I never loved you”: the haptics of differently oriented New York School poets and artists Maxime Petit: “The Actual Deed of Sex”: Homosexuality, Obscenity and Censorship in the Fiction of E.M. Forster
| Maleness, masculinity, virility (2) Chair: Hélène Aji Jane Malcolm: From Male Genius to the Mother of Us All: Gertrude Stein and Dashiell Hammett Talk Sex and Gender Clément Oudart: ‘You mean coitus?’: Priapus in the land of the eunuchs, or the stakes of hypersexualized writing in Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos. Thirthankar Chakraborty: A Crisis of Masculinity in Beckett’s Murphy and Ananthamurthy’s Samskara
| Hysteria, Perversion, Obscenity Chair: Naomi Toth Rosaria Murolo: Augustine’s Gaze: Hysteria as Perversion of Bourgeois Sexuality Tobias Jenkins: After Strange Gods: Masud Khan and Sexual Perversion Savina Stevanato: Is “this stuff […] too stiff for us”? The Case of Eliot’s Sexual and Bawdy Poems |
12:30-14:00 | Lunch | ||
14:00-15:30 | Queerness (3) Chair: Hélène Aji Karo Strauch: Lesbian Polyamorous Utopia: Queer Futurity in Natalie Barney’s Women Lovers or The Third Woman Naomi Toth: Against possession – Orlando Erotics Melissa Bradshaw: “Who’s that Lady?: Decoding Intimacies in Amy Lowell’s Letters | Femininity and the female body (1) Chair: Juliette Utard Julyan Oldham: “Hypothetical Virginity?”: Sex and Modernist Virginity Nora Pehrson: Modernist periods Lou Pinelli: The Modernist Second Sex: Simone de Beauvoir as a reader of Anglophone Modernist women writers
| Ambiguous Spaces Chair: Flore Coulouma Peter Kurtz: “Dat sure is the sullibrated word!”: Magdalene Laundries and Sequestered Sites of (Re)circulation in Finnegans Wake’s Poetics of Waste and Sex Louise Kane: Zhang Ailing’s “Sealed off”: Sex, Shanghai, and Chinese Modernism Maurice Fadel: Ambiguity and Sexuality in Formalist Literary Theory
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15:30-16:00 | Break | ||
16:00-17:30 | Representing Sex Chair: Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris Patrick Armstrong: Scientific Films, Sex and Spectatorship Enda Duffy: The Fire: Sexuality and an Alt-Biopolitics of Modernism Kevin Kennedy: Sex and Silence: Susan Sontag and The Failure of Representation in Modernist Literature
| Femininity and the female body (2) Chair: Anne-Pascale Bruneau-Rumsey Izabela Sobczak: Fragmented Figures: Modernist Metonymies of Desire (Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, and Hans Bellmer) Neethi Alexander: Erotics of the Unbeautiful: Sexuality, Ageing, and the Female Body in the works of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Djuna Barnes Barthélémy Rolland : From “Lost” and “Found” to “For Paul”: Lorine Niedecker’s Politics of the Body After Sex | Degeneration, eugenics and birth control Chair: Henry Carmines Sylvain Belluc: Eugenics and Birth Control in James Joyce’s “The Dead” Janice Ho: Birth Control and The Politics of Development in Aldous Huxley’s The Island David Ludwig: Sex, Modernism and Degeneration: Antimodernist Discourses from the Sittlichkeitsbewegung to Spengler
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20:00 | Conference dinner | ||
9:00-10:30 | Visual arts (1): the nude Chair: Anne-Pascale Bruneau-Rumsey Jane Garrity: Art Monster: Vanessa Bell’s Photographs of Nude Girls Anastasia G. Wildig: Intimate portraits: an examination of the artist-muse relationship and interpretations of the female nude during the modernist period Sirine Germani: From Orientalist Gaze to Pluralist Desire: The Politics of the Nude in Lebanese Modern and Contemporary Art | The politics of sexual liberation Chair: Olivier Hercend Karla Kelsey: “The Vaginal Cry”: Martha Graham, Anaïs Nin, and Sexual Politics James Dowthwaite: ‘Naked Liberation’: Sex and Modernism in Stephen Spender’s Hamburg Allan Hepburn: Muriel Spark and the Sexual Revolution
| Esotericism and Modernism: Hidden Knowledge Masking the Reproduction of the Normative (1) Moderator: Brennan Kettelle Jessica Albrecht: Masculinity and the Empire: Negotiations of Normativity between W. B. Yeats and R. Tagore Tanya Cheadle : Heroic Masculinity, Neo-Paganism and Celtic Revivalism in the Adventure Romances of John William Brodie Innes (1848-1923)
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10:30-11:00 | Break | ||
11:00-12:30 | Visual arts (2): expressionist & dada sex Chair: Astrid Maes Cole J. Graham: Bodily Matters: Egon Schiele and the Erotics of Disability Martin Harries: Sexuality in Kurt Schwitters’ Collages Zanë Hadri: The Zero-Degree of Emotion: Francis Picabia’s Mechanomorphism as Affective Diagram of Modern Sexuality
| Sex, writing and reading Chair: Daniel Jean James Dutton: Taste Matters: Proust, Writing and Dying for Sex Brian Richardson: Reading and Sex in Modernist Fiction Samantha Lemeunier: “A secret having to do profoundly with her sex”: William Carlos Williams’s Eroticization of Women’s Writings
| Esotericism and Modernism: Hidden Knowledge Masking the Reproduction of the Normative (2) Moderator: Brennan Kettelle Christine Ferguson: Dion Fortune and Magical Miscegenation in the 1920s Occult Milieu. Manon Hedenborg White: Turbaned Orientals and women of the underworld”: Whiteness and heterosexuality interrupted in early-20th century tabloid portrayals of Aleister Crowley Hubert Cook: Bodied Knowledge Protocols: James Baldwin’s Modern Speculations of Sex and Captivity
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12.30-14:00 | Lunch | ||
14:00-15:00 | Keynote Jean-Michel Rabaté: “All were lacking if sex were lacking” Freud, Eliot, Woolf, and Sackville-West
Chair: Benoît Tadié | ||
15:00-15:30 | Break | ||
15:30-17:00 | Visual arts (3): the male gaze and female exploitation Chair: Anne-Pascale Bruneau-Rumsey Ya’ara Gil-Glazer: From Fin-de-Siècle Misogyny to Countercultural Women’s Liberation: Art Nouveau’s Sexual Imagery Reframed Camille Rollando-Kozlowski: The City of Light, the City of Desire: Photography and Sexual Difference in Modernist Paris Ciaran Hervás: Eros in the Museum: Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sexological Museum in Photo-illustrated Magazines
| Deviance, transgression and violence Chair: Benoît Tadié Asiya Bulatova: Masturbation as Device Sexual: Transgression and Modernist Form in Viktor Shklovsky’s Subversive Editing Elsa Baroghel: Sade, Beckett and (post)modern sexuality Gina Stamm: Femme-enfant-animal: Greta Knutson’s Sex and Structural Violence
| Modernist Seductions Chair: Xavier Kalck Olivier Hercend: Joycean Seduction: from the Heavens to brothels via billboards and pick up artists Shirley Bricout: Adam and Eve: Figures of reclaimed sexuality in D. H. Lawrence’s works Astrid Maes: Faulkner’s Sexual Poetics of Ecstasy
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