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Sylvia Plath Society Conference, 11-12 March 2022



The Sylvia Plath Society is hosting an online conference, "Sylvia Plath Across the Century",  on Friday-Saturday, 11-12 March 2022. Click here for registration information. This is, naturally, terrifically exciting, and features a very international collection of speakers.

Below is the schedule. Please note all times are posted in GMT. And thanks must go to Dorka Tamás, Julie Irigaray, Kitty Shaw for organizing this event.

Day 1: 11 March 2022

9.45-10.00 Welcome to the conference!
Dorka Tamás, Julie Irigaray, Kitty Shaw

Breakout Room A: 10.00-11.30 -- Food and femininity
Chair: Sarah-Jane Burton

1. Sabine Verlie Kildea: Plath, Food, and the Body: Unravelling Plath's complex relationship between food and femininity
2. Eilish Mulholland: "Whole as a Pie": Domesticity and Dining in The Bell Jar and Beyond


Breakout Room B: 10.00-11.30 -- Influences and Imagination
Chair: Kitty Shaw

1. Lana Chryssavgis: Spaces, bodies, and impersonal subjectivities: A reconfiguration of modernist poetics in Ariel
2. Julie Irigaray: Sylvia Plath as a Student and Reader of French Literature
3. Leila Kamali: Imagining an Anti-Racist Plath

11.30-11.45 -- Coffee Break

Breakout Room A: 11.45-13.15 -- Geographical places
Chair: Leila Kamali

1. Di Beddow: "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows"
2. Annika J Lindskog: "Rooks Croak Havoc:" Sylvia Plath's Cambridge Poetry and the Poetic Imagination
3. Emily Bell: "To whiten my bones among them": Sylvia Plath in "Brontë Country"

Breakout Room B: 11.45-13.15 -- Plath's reception
Chair: Lucy Cheseldine

1. Maria Revenko: The Reception of Sylvia Plath in Russia
2. Lillian Crawford: Burning the Letters Home: The staging of Sylvia Plath's letters to her mother by Rose Leiman Goldemberg and Chantal Akerman
3. Savannah Marciezyk: Restoring Sylvia Plath with Ariel: The Restored Edition

13.15-13.45 -- Lunch Break

Breakout Room A: 13.45-15.15 -- Gender and feminist approaches
Chair: Sophronia Knott

1. Giulia Regoli: "The world itself is the bad dream": themes of gender and madness in The Bell Jar
2. Benedetta Albano: Women at Work: Sylvia Plath's Lessons for Today

Breakout Room B: 13.45-15.15 -- Animals and Ecocriticism
Chair: Julie Irigaray

1. Olivia Foster: Cohabiting with the Environment: An ecocritical survey of Sylvia Plath's literary environmentalism
2. Nassim Jalali: Beyond the Binary: "Wilderness and Civilisation"
3. Calista McRae: "Let be, let be": Plath and the Animal-Welfare Lyric

15.15-15.30 -- Coffee Break

Breakout Room A: 15.30-17.00 -- Motherhood and domesticity
Chair: Heather Clark

1. Georg Nöffke: Labouring Towards an "Edge": Motherhood, Speech and Silence at the End of Sylvia Plath's Ariel Voice
2. Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis: Women and Children in Plath's Children's Stories
3. Amanda Montei: "Making in All Its Forms": Care Work and Housework in Plath's Late Writing

Breakout Room B: 15.30-17.00 -- Plath's influence on other writers
Chair: Catherine Rankovic

1. Gillian Groszewski: "Them lady poets must not marry, pal": John Berryman and Sylvia Plath
2. Mattia Mossali: "Dying is an art": Sylvia Plath and Amelia Rosselli
3. Robert Shoemaker and Alexandra Merritt Mathews: Animal Trapping Exercise: Becoming Sylvia and Creating the Biographical Musical PLATH/HUGHES

17.00- 18.00 -- Keynote Speech
Chair: Dorka Tamás

Amanda Golden: Office Hours: Sylvia Plath, Pedagogy, and the Archive


Day 2: 12 March 2022

10.45-11.00 Welcome Back!

Breakout Room A: 11.15-12.45 -- Plath's archives
Chair: Dorka Tamás

1. Natalie Hurt: Archives, Biographies and Estate Control: Writing about Writing on Sylvia Plath
2. Holly Ranger: "Whetting my mind like a blue-bladed knife": Sylvia Plath and Dorothea Krook
3. Peter K. Steinberg: Sylvia Plath and the Glascock Poetry Contest

Breakout Room B: 11.15-12.45 -- Plath and magic
Chair: Ester Díaz Morillo

1. Joseph Earp: Sylvia Plath, Anxiety, And Supernatural Thinking
2. Giulia de Gregorio Listo: Plath & The Ouroboros Goddess
3. Gabriela Zetehaku: Ink Goddess: the Narrativization and Dramatization of Life, Love, and the Self in Sylvia Plath's Journals and Letters

12.45-13.15 -- Lunch Break

Breakout Room A: 13.15-14.45 -- Plath in Popular Culture
Chair: Julie Irigaray

1. Ester Díaz Morillo: A Dialogue between Poetry and Music: The Curious Case of Sylvia Plath
2. Lukáš Samek: Confessions of a Different Kind: Plath's Reflection in the Works of Lana Del Rey
3. Anna Dykta: Sylvia Plath: The Reigning Queen of Social Media

Breakout Room B: 13.15-14.45 -- Short stories and children's stories Chair: Patricia Grisafi

1. Dibakar Sarkar: Children's Plath
2. Cathleen Allyn Conway: End of the Line: the Gothic Terror of Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom3. 3. Gary Leising: Sassoon with Dolphin: Sylvia Plath's Life, Lost Novel, Short Story, and the Symbolism of the Stone Boy

14.45-15.00 -- Coffee Break

Breakout Room A: 15.00-16.30 -- Medical Humanities reinterpretation

Chair: Kitty Shaw

1. Gudrun Palomino Tirado: Medical Humanities analysis in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar
2. Julia Sattler: "I felt like a hole in the ground" – Reading The Bell Jar through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
3. Erin Brown: From "two little pills" to "a necessary evil": Sylvia Plath and Barbiturate Consumption 

Breakout Room B: 15.00-16.30 -- Uncanny Observations
Chair: Dorka Tamás

1. Daniela Straková: Dark Humour of Sylvia Plath
2. Eva Stenskar: Plath on the Threshold
3. Nels P. Highberg: Plath Pattern Baldness

16.40-16.55 -- Creative Interlude
Chair: Julie Irigaray

John Sweeney: "Confessions of a Recovering Altar Boy": A Dramatic Monologue on Plath, Poetry and Meditation

17.00-18.00 Keynote Speech
Chair: Dorka Tamás and Julie Irigaray

Sarah Corbett: After Sylvia: An Anthology and a Festival to Celebrate Sylvia Plath's 90th birthday

All links accessed 19 February 2022.
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