Witnessing through Literature and the Arts:
A Transdisciplinary Symposium

May 30 & 31, 2024
Sciences Po, Campus de Paris
1 place Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin

 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”