OEGC 2026 Programme, text only
9.00-9.20 Registration
9.20-9.30 Opening Remarks
9.30-11.00 Session I
Homosocial Relations – Lecture Theatre
Chair: TBC
- Jesse Astley, “‘The Library Annex’: Queer friendship and collaborative poetry in the early years of the AIDS epidemic”
- Robin Reinders, “The T.C.B.S. and ‘Allowable Distance Apart’: Interdisciplinarity, Productive Tension and the Collective Origins of Tolkienian Fellowship”
- Brian Moore, “Desert Island Aristos: Beckett, Proust, and the End of ‘Le Monde’”
Intermedial Collaborations – Seminar Room 1
Chair: TBC
- Victoria Maiden, “Interpretation and Intervention: Female Visual Expression in Florence Harrison’s Poetic Illustrations”
- Ava McLean, ““This Is Improbable + Sentimental”: Film Adaptation and Collaboration in the Graham Swift Archive”
- Nicole Gibbons, “Strange Theologies: Visual Exegesis and William Stukeley’s Extra-Illustrated Book of Common Prayer (c. 1733)”
Bedfellows Across Time – Seminar Room 2
Chair: TBC
- Rosie Parkes, “The Victorian Afterlives of The Decameron X.7”
- Vida Long, “'A Useful Poet’: The ‘English Poets’ in Maurice Gee’s Plumb (1978)”
- Nic Nicolaou, “Is There a Text in This Calendar? John Lydgate's A Kalendare and Fifteenth-Century Ideas of Literature.”
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Session II
Strange Bedfellows on the Page – Lecture Theatre
Chair: TBC
- Imogen Edmundson, “‘I made of my ffrend my ffoo’: Discomfort and the Desire to Create in Fifteenth-Century Short Verse”
- Chloë Olliff, “How Anthony Wood Read His Ballads: Dissimilitude, Disjunction, and Memory in Early Modern Ballad Collections”
- Evie Sutcliffe, “Queer (Re)productive Futurism in Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928) and Nightwood (1936)
Productive Tensions – Seminar Room 1
Chair: TBC
- Caitlin Kawalek, “Wandering from the ‘Beaten Track’: Laetitia Pilkington, Error, and Predictive Processing”
- Seán O'Neill, “‘As wife & husband’: Intimacy and Mimetic Rivalry in The Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597)”
- Oisin McManus,“Gothic and anti-Gothic Impulses in Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep”
Centring the Nonhuman – Seminar Room 2
Chair: TBC
- Tatun Harrison-Turnbull, “Erotic plasticity: Prophylaxis, Prosthesis, and Containment in Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Scott Guild’s Plastic: A Novel (2024)”
- Johannah Maria Fienburgh, “Agential Determinism: digging into the enmeshed nature of determinism and nonhuman agency in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations.”
- Caroline Drapeau, ““Her companion wherever she went”: Representations of the Canine in Black Women’s Fiction in Antebellum America”
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-15.30 Session III
Playing with Authorship – Lecture Theatre
Chair: TBC
- Brody C. J. Eldridge, “The A(I)uthor: LLMs, Dead Authors, and Entanglement”
- Annabel Marshall, “‘I Remember When I Wrote The Circus’: The Lyric as Genetic in Kenneth Koch’s ‘Circus’ Poems”
- Max Shirley, “Narrative's Queer Inheritance”
Interdisciplinary Conversations – Seminar Room 1
Chair: TBC
- Rosa Appignanesi, “The Veritable Actress: Hysteria in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1892)”
- Emily Maisonville, “Free Will and Evil: Coleridge’s Philosophical Polyamory and Its Progeny”
- Nathan Walker, “Cleanth Brooks and Lancelot Andrewes”
15.30-16.00 Break
16.00-17.00 Keynote (Lecture Theatre) – Professor Kirsten E. Shepherd
17.00-17.10 Closing Remarks
17.10-18.00 Drinks Reception
