The Seattle Metamodernism Summit (September 10 & 11, 2022) is co-sponsored by the AHRC Metamodernism Research Network, What is Metamodern?, and Abbey Arts. It is an international, interdisciplinary meeting, accessible both online and in-person. The presentations are meant to be meaningful to both the curious public and the academic community.
Participant Bios
Organizers
Antony Rowland — AHRC Metamodernism Research Network, Director
Antony Rowland is director of the AHRC Metamodernism Research Network, which has been running conferences, symposia and creative events since 2017: these have taken place in Manchester, Keele, Oslo, Nijmegen and Amsterdam. In 2021, he was awarded an AHRC Leadership Fellowship to complete his monograph Metamodernism in Contemporary British Poetry for Cambridge University Press, and initiate further network events in the US, Australia, Finland and The Netherlands. Antony is Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Linda Ceriello — Seattle Metamodernism Summit, Presider
Linda Ceriello is an instructor in the Interdisciplinary Studies department at Kennesaw State University. She has presented and published essays applying metamodern theory to such topics as secular spirituality, the monstrous Other, and paranormal-themed popular culture since 2013. She is co-founder/editor of the web journal, What Is Metamodern? with Greg Dember, and also co-hosts a YouTube video series, What is Metamodern: Conversations. She recently organized the first panel of metamodernism scholars in the field of religious studies at the American Academy of Religions (2021); there she presented a genealogy: "Overview of the Academic Research on Metamodernism" (Prezi available to the public!) She is working on a book proposal that brings together her research in the areas of contemporary spiritualities, mysticism, awe and wonder, and metamodern theory. She currently divides her time between Vashon Island, WA and Winston-Salem, NC.
Greg Dember — Seattle Metamodernism Summit, Lead Organizer
An independent researcher, Greg Dember writes on metamodernism in film, television, music, and in meta-theoretical terms. In 2013, with Linda Ceriello, Ph.D., he cofounded the website whatismetamodern.com, a catalog of metamodern artifacts across many areas of culture. In addition to his popular writing on metamodernism, Greg has offered his work in various academic publications and conferences, including a talk titled “Punk Rock for Sissies: The Return of Affect in Early 21st Century American Indie Rock” at the 2019 AHRC Metamodernism Conference at Radboud University. He has been interviewed for numerous podcasts on the topic of metamodernism. Greg is at work on a book introducing metamodernism to the popular audience. He received his B.A. in psychology from Yale University in 1987, where he also studied literature.
Keynote Roundtable
Alison Gibbons
Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (Routledge, 2012), and co-editor of Mark Z. Danielewski (Manchester University Press, 2011), the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Routledge 2012), Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She has also published widely in international peer-reviewed journals, including: Ariel, Contemporary Literature, Metaphor in the Social World, Narrative, and Textual Practice. Her research consistently takes a stylistic approach to innovative contemporary narratives, including empirical reception research, and is currently focused on metamodernism and autofiction.
Robin van den Akker
Robin van den Akker is Senior Lecturer in the Humanities and Director of the Erasmus Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He also is academic board member of the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab and coordinator of the MA Societal Transitions at the Erasmus School of Philosophy. As (acting) program coordinator and Head of Department he has been foundational in establishing the Humanities Department at Erasmus University College Rotterdam. Robin has written extensively on the digitization of everyday life and contemporary aesthetics and culture and his work has been translated in numerous languages, including Mandarin, Russian, German, and Spanish.
Robin was founding editor of the research platform 'Notes on Metamodernism', which mapped and analysed changes in aesthetics and culture that are symptomatic of the post-postmodern condition. He is co-editor of the edited collection Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth (2017).
Timotheus Vermeulen
Timotheus Vermeulen is professor of Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is founding editor of the now archived webzine Notes on Metamodernism and a regular contributor to Frieze and Art Forum. Vermeulen publishes across the disciplines of critical and cultural theory, aesthetics, and screen studies. He is currently finalising a manuscript titled Gestures of Time: Screen Performance as Temporal Form, to be out with SUNY in 2023. A collection on the films of Richard Linklater, edited with Kim Wilkins, will be published with EUP later this year.
Songwriter/Poet Panel
John Van Deusen
John Van Deusen creates aggressively honest, thematically rich power pop. His style is built on a strange foundation of influences, resulting in an indie rock sound that feels both familiar and curious. From his early career in The Lonely Forest (Trans/Atlantic Records) to his recent outings as a solo recording artist, intimacy and vulnerability have been hallmarks of his songwriting. Consider his work as a little note that says, "It's okay to not be ok.”
Throughout all of his work, John Van Deusen seeks to holistically examine the human heart, starting with his own. Like with the three installments that preceded it, Marathon Daze—the final chapter in Van Deusen’s (I Am) Origami album series—illuminates the darkness and divinity that coexist in a life. It’s Van Deusen’s single-most encompassing artistic statement both musically and thematically.
John Van Deusen currently resides in Anacortes with his wife and son. He also plays in the punk band, Buffet and pop band, Telephone Friends.
Sierra Nelson
Sierra Nelson is a poet, lyric essayist, educator, and collaborative performance, film, and installation artist, with a B.A. in English Literature from Vassar College and an M.F.A. in Poetry from University of Washington. Sierra Nelson’s books include The Lachrymose Report (PoetryNW Editions), collaborations with visual artist Loren Erdrich including I Take Back the Sponge Cake (Rose Metal Press, selected by Anne Carson for NYU’s Washington Square Review Collaboration Award), and Vis-à-Vis Society collaborations such as Who Are We? with 7-inch vinyl record (with support from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s CityArtist Grant). Sierra Nelson's poetry-film “Four Imagined Movies” was made with support from the NEA, Poetry Northwest, and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. For more info: songsforsquid.tumblr.com
Costello
Costello grew up near the high deserts of California and traveled for many years collecting experiences before settling down in the Pacific Northwest. Her music tells her life's story in sweeping allegory and speaks of the deep longing, curiosity, and mysteries that come with being human. Her songs invite you to feel it all and to ultimately release it all back to the unknown.
Scott Thurston
Scott Thurston is a poet, mover and educator based in the UK. He has published sixteen books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Terraces (Beir Bua, 2022) and Phrases towards a Kinepoetics (Contraband, 2020). Scott is founding co-editor of open access Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and co-organized the long-running poetry reading series The Other Room in Manchester. Since 2004, he has been developing a poetics integrating dance and poetry which has seen him studying with dancers in Berlin and New York and collaborating with dancers in the UK. Scott is a Professor in the English Department at the University of Salford, where he has taught since 2004.
Antony Rowland — Moderator
Antony Rowland has published three poetry collections: The Land of Green Ginger (Salt, 2008), I Am a Magenta Stick (Salt, 2012) - which was described by Peter Riley in The Fortnightly Review as ‘an original and thoughtful handling of a major European modernist mode’ - and M (Arc, 2017). He was awarded the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2012, and his poems were included in the anthology Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). He received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2000, and recorded for the national Poetry Archive in 2009, and the Lyrikline (Berlin) in 2014. The Dutch government elected him as a UK poetry ‘ambassador’ for 2016: his poetry was read on national television, and shown on screens at Schipol airport and Amsterdam Central Station.
Greg Dember — Moderator
Arriving in Seattle in the Nineties as an improvising technical piano player, Greg Dember was inevitably influenced by both the rainy-day moodiness and the sunny-sky pop-melodicism of his new home's music scene. A couple decades into the new millennium, we find Greg thriving creatively as a singer and songwriter. With a style that bounces around between indie pop, piano songster, quirky folk and experimental, Greg finally settled on “post-genre” as his musical category. Over the years, Greg has released 7 albums of his own music, and participated as band member in various outfits performing rock, jam-band, lounge/jazz and even a Carpenters cover band.
Presenters
Katie Elson Anderson
Katie Elson Anderson is a reference librarian at Paul Robeson Library, Rutgers University-Camden, NJ. Her research topics include digital privacy, evaluating news sources, TikTok, and metamodernism. She has presented on various popular culture topics, including metamodernism at PCA (Popular Culture Association) and MAPACA (Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Association). Katie maintains a working bibliography for research on metamodernism (https://katieanderson.camden.rutgers.edu/bibliographies/metamodernism/).
Rositsa Bratkova
Rositsa Bratkova is an architect, one of the two partners at the Sofia based TTHR Aedes Studio. Born in 1977 in Sofia, she graduated in 2002 with a master`s degree in Architecture from the UACEG in Sofia. Between 2014 and 2016 she took a master`s degree in Architectural Theory and Criticism from the same university under the mentorship of Juhani Pallasmaa. Since 2017 she’s been teaching architectural design at UACEG. The architectural studio she leads with her husband has won many awards, formed part of the Venice Biennale in 2008 and has designed the only Bulgarian building that was selected in the Mies van der Rohe award in 2009. Their design is significantly metamodern, whereas the interest in other metamodern design practices. At the present she is working on her doctoral thesis “Design Principles in the Architecture of David Chipperfield, Kengo Kuma and Christian Kerez – Metamodernism in Architecture”.
Benjamin Broadribb
Benjamin Broadribb is a doctoral researcher at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. His thesis focuses upon the cultural significance of twenty-first century screen adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare, spanning cinema, television and online productions. Benjamin is more widely interested in the moving image, adaptation and the social and cultural sensibility of the twenty-first century, particularly metamodernism. He has contributed a chapter to the forthcoming edited collection Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, and is also contributing a chapter to an edited collection on Shakespearean biofiction, due to be published by Bloomsbury Arden in 2023. Benjamin is also the co-editor of a forthcoming edited collection Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, co-edited with Gemma Kate Allred and Erin Sullivan, due to be published by Bloomsbury Arden in June 2022.
James Benedict Brown
James Benedict Brown is Associate Professor of Architecture at Umeå University, Sweden. He is the co-editor, with Sofie Pelsmakers, of the forthcoming Architectural Thinking in a Climate Emergency (Routledge 2023), author of Mediated Space: the Architecture of News, Advertising and Entertainment (RIBA Publishing, 2018) and co-editor with Harriet Harriss, Ruth Morrow and James Soane of A Gendered Profession: the Question of Representation in Space Making (RIBA Publishing, 2016). With the support of the Kempe Foundations and postdoctoral researcher Francesco Camilli, he is currently researching the role of timber in live projects and design build in architectural education.
Cesar Cornejo
Cesar Cornejo is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the
relationship between art, architecture and society and who is influenced by
having lived and worked in four different cultures: Peru, Japan, England
and USA. He has participated in exhibitions such as Art Positions, London Art Fair
2020, California Pacific Triennial 2017, XII Havana Biennial 2015, Busan
Biennial 2008, Art Positions at Art Basel Miami 2011, the Biennial S-Files
Museo del Barrio, NY 2007, and V Biennial Barro de America, Venezuela
2004, and is selected to participate in the upcoming NY Latin American Art
Triennial 2022. He received MA and PhD degrees in Fine Arts from the Tokyo University of
the Arts and bachelor degree and professional license in architecture from
the Ricardo Palma University in Lima Peru. He is the founder of the
community based contemporary art museum project Puno Museum of
Contemporary Art (Puno MoCA) and works as associate professor at the
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies of the University of
Leeds.
Dan Dubowitz
Dan Dubowitz is Reader in Architecture and International Lead at Manchester School of Architecture. He is Director of the cross-school teaching atelier: FLUX investigating how architecture can be on the move and activate a state of change. His current research project, ‘Remaking Your City’, is concerned with developing new methods and processes that could better engage citizens in remaking their city. Dubowitz is founder and director of Civic Works Ltd, a multi-disciplinary design practice for city-making. From 1997 -2015 he delivered 9 city-scale Cultural Masterplans for post-industrial areas in decline in 5 city-regions across the UK from Glasgow (Gorbals), and Manchester (Ancoats) to London (Nine Elms). He is author of a number of monographs including Citizen Manchester (2014) and The Peeps (2011) on the transformation of Manchester, Wastelands (2009) on post-industrial cities around the world, and Fascismo Abbandonato (2010) on the Children’s colonies of Mussolini’s Italy.
Jenny Eden
Jenny Eden is a painter, writer and lecturer based in Salford, UK. Her paintings are driven by process, colour and a painting’s oscillatory characteristics, perceived through the complex exchange between painter and painting and the work’s evolving communicable potential. Jenny lectures in Fine Art Painting at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, on the BA Fine Art and MA Painting programmes, and she is currently studying a By Practice PhD in Painting. She co-runs Oceans Apart, a gallery in Salford dedicated to contemporary painting, and she has exhibited her own work across the UK and in Berlin.
Mika Hallila
Mika Hallila works currently as a professor of literature at the University of Eastern Finland. Hallila has specialized in the research of contemporary novel and literary theory, especially the theory of the novel. He has published two research monographs, eighteen peer-reviewed articles, and dozens of non-peer-reviewed scientific articles, scholarly essays, edited books and journals. In 2013–2018 Hallila worked as a visiting professor of Finnish literature and culture at the University of Warsaw in Poland. In 2019 he published a research monograph on smoking in Finnish literature from the 19th century to the 21st century. A great part of Hallila’s research discusses contemporary novel, metafiction, postmodernism, modernism, and the theory of the novel. His current research interests include metamodernism, Asko Sahlberg's novels, and representations of suicide in contemporary Finnish literature.
Monika Kaup
Monika Kaup is Professor of English at the University of Washington. Her scholarship focuses on 20th and 21st-century American and Latinx literatures, hemispheric American literature, the neobaroque, and critical theory. Her books include Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (U of Virginia P, 2012) and Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (co-edited, Duke UP 2010). Her most recent study, New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory (Edinburgh UP 2021), revisions realism in the era of post-critique and climate change, showcasing a new context-based concept of the real. Her present talk emerges from a current book project entitled “Believable Narratives,” which seeks to recover narrative as a humanistic tool of knowledge production after the exhaustion of postmodernism.
Zebadiah Kraft
I am an ABD doctoral student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, studying American Literature and Utopianism. My dissertation focuses specifically on zombies and the metamodern turn. I am interested in literature, film, and video games that depict the undead as more than mindlessly violent and who reclaim humanity or community after death, as they represent a shift in what it means to be in ever-expanding liminal spaces in late capitalist and ecological destruction. In my day job, I have taught first-year writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage for ten years.
Rene Marzuk
Rene Marzuk is an English master’s student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Raised in Cuba, he has been living in the United States since 2009. His research interests include Modern American literature and literary-cultural intertextuality; children’s literature; cultural studies; semiotics, code-switching practices, and articulation of marginal identities in literary works; postcolonial, comparative, and world literature with emphasis on Latin American narrative and poetry; postmodernism and its successors; environmental studies; and popular culture. Whenever he needs a break, he goes for a run.
Gia Milinovich
Gia Milinovich is currently doing an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in London. She is researching the porous border between the Digital and Material world both technically- with video, photography and computers - and philosophically via Marcel Duchamp's concept of the infrathin. She is particularly interested in the idea of alienation and how it relates to this divide between the Real and the Digital.
Paula Romero Polo
I am a PhD student in Humanities at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. My current research focuses on 21st century Spanish literature and the concept of metamodernism. In my Ph.D. project, I use the metamodern vernacular to analyze five recent Spanish novels, paying particular attention to their depiction of contemporary society. Its provisional title is "Metamodern subjectivity within the Spanish context: current narrative as an x-ray of the present."
Jake Pruett
I am a Ph.D. student in Literature at the University of Washington. I am originally a San Diego native, but after a few years of living in the Northwest I think I can now safely call myself a Seattleite. My research interests involve the intersection of experimental fiction, phenomenology, ethics, ecology, and neuroscience. I am especially interested in two recent developments in experimental literature: the neuronovel and climate fiction.
Simon Radchenko
Simon Radchenko is a Ukrainian PhD student at University of Turin, Italy. His academic interests are pre-Historic art and contemporary literature. Currently, his main areas of interest in literary studies are metamodernism in contemporary writing and video games, object-oriented ontologies and carnival culture.
Kasimir Sandbacka
Kasimir Sandbacka, PhD, is a literary scholar at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research interests include late modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism, as well as irony, nostalgia, and utopia. His current research project, Post-war European History and Metamodernism in Contemporary Finnish Literature, is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is a historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He is currently Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. Storm received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, his MA from Harvard University, and has held visiting positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, and Universität Leipzig in Germany. He is the author of award-winning The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), as well as Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), all published by University of Chicago Press.
Sara Upstone
Professor Sara Upstone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Faculty Director of Postgraduate Research at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University. Her publications include Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction (Routledge, 2017), British Asian Fiction: Twenty-first-century Voices (Manchester University Press, 2011) and Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel (Ashgate, 2010). She is the co-editor of Postmodern Literature and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Researching and Representing Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters. (Palgrave, 2014), Postcolonial Spaces: the Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave, 2011) and the forthcoming (with Kristian Shaw) Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Hari Kunzru (Manchester University Press, 2022) and (with Peter Ely) From Blair to Brexit: Community in Contemporary British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Daniel Vogel
Daniel Vogel is an independent researcher based in Portland, OR. They graduated from The Evergreen State College with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Media Studies in 2019, and wrote a senior thesis on relationships between programming language development, child development, and the origins of the metamodern. Beyond their work as a theorist, Daniel also works as a Frontend Web Developer for a NY-based startup, participates as a litigant in a student-journalism public records lawsuit against their alma mater, and plays saxophone and guitar.
Graham Young
Graham Young is currently a PhD candidate in Social Inquiry at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His research focuses on the way advertising reflects broader cultural trends. In his work, Graham examines advertising as an art form. His interdisciplinary project covers topics such as economics, climate change, and politics with a focus on how advertisements from organisations such as banks, NGOs, and political parties reflect an emerging ‘Structure of Feeling’ called Metamodernism.