Writing for Living:
Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities
February 19-20, 2021
Please register for Zoom connections

Friday, 3:30-5 PST:
https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJApcO2upzkrHNXJIpeessjoejEbdjqIQ3UF

Saturday, 11:00-12:30 and 12:50-2:20 PST:
https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrceyhrz0jGNPQA9pd9-MXOQhZ205ABiK3

Emphasizing her relationship to writing as a practice that makes living possible, this conference honors the work of Distinguished Professor Emerita Helene Moglen (1936-2018). She contributed richly to feminist and psychoanalytic theory in literature, feminist institution building, teaching and mentoring graduate and undergraduate students, and teaching writing in and out of the university. Her generative vitality and creative critical thinking touched everyone who knew her.

Writing grounded Helene’s deep optimism and vitality. She wrote every morning—by hand, in notebooks. She encouraged writers, whether in poetry, scholarship, cultural and political analysis, or fiction; and she responded in detail and with immense generosity to the drafts of her colleagues, whether they were in her field or not, into her last summer.

Professor Moglen’s academic home was the Literature Department. Her monographs include The Trauma of Gender (2001), Sexual and Gender Harassment in the Academy (1981), The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne (1976), and Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived (1975). She also co-edited five collections that explored the intersection of literature, psychoanalysis, race, and feminism, including (with Elizabeth Abel and Barbara Christian), Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997) and (with Nancy Chen and in conjunction with the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research) Bodies in the Making (2006).

At the time of her death, Helene Moglen was working on the effects of social media on the formation of subjects and the possibilities for face-to-face democracy. She probed the intimate and public consequences of personal data harvesting, surveillance practices, business models, and the allure of screens over embodied presence. She would have appreciated the irony of holding this conference on Zoom!

Full conference schedule and more information at: https://humanities.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/helene-moglen-conference.html

Sponsored by the Humanities Division and the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment