Witnessing through Literature and the Arts

A Transdisciplinary Symposium organised by Sciences Po Centre for History, OSUN Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, Sciences Po Institute for the arts and creation

Thursday, May 30 

1:45 pm Welcome and Opening Remarks 

2-4 pm Panel I- Narratives of Witnessing: Intersections of History, Testimony, and Memory in Genocide Studies 

• Chairperson: Larissa Muraveva (Bard College Berlin) 
• Boris Adjemian (CRH-EHESS), “Early Narratives on the Armenian Genocide: Aram Andonian, Writer and Witness” 
• Judith Lyon-Caen (CRH-EHESS), “What does form testify to? Epistemologies of Testimony among Holocaust Survivor-Historians”
• Frédérik Detue (CTELA-Univ. Côte d’Azur.), Charlotte Lacoste (CREM-Univ. Lorraine), Judith Lyon-Caen (CRH-EHESS): “On Interdisciplinarity and Testimony” 

4:30-6 pm Artist Address

A Dialogue with French-Rwandan writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse: “Reclaiming One’s Own Survival Story”

Welcome Drinks Reception

Friday, May 31

10 am-12:30 pm Panel II- Testimony through Film, Literature, and the Visual Arts: 
Witnessing Pandemics and Conflict 

• Chairperson: James Harker (Bard Berlin) 
• Thibaut Boulvain (CHSP, Sciences Po), “The Spanish Flu: A Quiet Pandemic” 
• Laura Kunreuther (Bard College, New York), “Earwitnesses: On the Labor and Testimony of Humanitarian Interpreters” 
• Amir Moosavi (Rutgers University-Newark), “Warfront Apocrypha: The Dead, Desertion, and Dystopia” 
• Patricia Zalamea (Univ. of Los Andes) and Helena Alviar (Ecole de droit, Sciences Po), “Bearing Witness: Transitional Justice and Land in the Work of Delcy Morelos” 

12:30-2 pm Lunch Break 

2:30-4:30 pm Panel III- Auto/Fiction, New Media, and Testimony 

• Chairperson: Laura Kunreuther (Bard College New York) 
• Larissa Muraveva (Bard College Berlin), “Nostalgia for the Immediacy: The Role of the Witness and Mediated Experience in Contemporary Autofiction”
• Julio Prieto (Universidad Complutense, Madrid), “Archive Fever: Hybrid Testimony and Documentary Fiction in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez”
• James Harker (Bard College Berlin), “Autofiction, Social Media, and Collective Testimony”
• Christopher Fort (American University of Central Asia), “Notes on Abdulla Qahhor’s Testimony” 

5 pm-6:30 pm Artist/Scholar Address

Alicia Partnoy (Loyola Marymount University), “When Survivors Write: Literature and Discourse of Solidarity”