This year, we're ecstatic to have two brilliant keynote speakers:
K.L. Evans and David LaRocca
K.L. Evans
"Keeping it Together: The Monster Makes His Case"
"Keeping it Together: The Monster Makes His Case"
My research specialty is Literature and Philosophy. I am the author, most recently, of One Foot in the Finite: Melville’s Realism Reclaimed (Northwestern University Press, 2017), which explores Melville’s passion for philosophy that does not progressively distance itself from the concrete lives of humans. I have in addition written Whale! (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), a reframing of Ahab’s pursuit of the whale as a search for connection and meaning, and co-edited (with Branka Arsić, Professor of English at Columbia University) Melville’s Philosophies (Bloomsbury, 2017). My work has appeared in such journals as Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, and discusses such authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Matthew Arnold as well as Stanley Cavell, Henri Bergson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I’m also a devoted and acclaimed teacher. I’ve held tenure-track positions in the departments of English at the University of Redlands and at Yeshiva University in New York City, where I taught a wide range of courses in American literature, literature and philosophy, literature and film, and—with relish—first-year writing. I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York College at Cortland. My website is http://www.klevans.org/
David LaRocca
"Cinematic Dissonance: Mediating the Marriage of Sound and Image"
"Cinematic Dissonance: Mediating the Marriage of Sound and Image"
Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University David LaRocca was educated at Buffalo, Berkeley, Vanderbilt, and Harvard (B.A., Hon., ΦΒΚ, M.A., M.T.S., Ph.D.), where he studied philosophy, film, rhetoric, and religion. At Harvard, he worked with Stanley Cavell and Giuliana Bruno, and edited Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford University Press). He served as Harvard’s Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellow in the United Kingdom, participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute and in The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. In recent years, he taught film theory, history, and analysis in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, value theory and film as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College at Cortland (where he was recipient of a Teaching Innovation Award), and fulfilled an appointment as Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Cornell University, which culminated with the publication of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene.
LaRocca has edited three books on film: The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, The Philosophy of War Films, and The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth. Journal articles have appeared in Afterimage, Epoché, Liminalities, Transactions, Film and Philosophy, The Senses and Society, The Midwest Quarterly, Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He has contributed book chapters on Michael Mann, Spike Lee, the Coen brothers, Tim Burton, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Casey Affleck, and Sofia Coppola, among others. He wrote the introduction to Takashi Homma’s New Waves and the afterword to Julian Hibbard’s Schematics. As a documentary filmmaker, he produced and edited six features in The Intellectual Portrait Series, and more recently directed Brunello Cucinelli: A New Philosophy of Clothes, which premiered at the New York City International Film Festival. He participated in a cinema workshop with Abbas Kiarostami and attended Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. David's website is www.davidlarocca.org.
LaRocca has edited three books on film: The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, The Philosophy of War Films, and The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth. Journal articles have appeared in Afterimage, Epoché, Liminalities, Transactions, Film and Philosophy, The Senses and Society, The Midwest Quarterly, Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He has contributed book chapters on Michael Mann, Spike Lee, the Coen brothers, Tim Burton, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Casey Affleck, and Sofia Coppola, among others. He wrote the introduction to Takashi Homma’s New Waves and the afterword to Julian Hibbard’s Schematics. As a documentary filmmaker, he produced and edited six features in The Intellectual Portrait Series, and more recently directed Brunello Cucinelli: A New Philosophy of Clothes, which premiered at the New York City International Film Festival. He participated in a cinema workshop with Abbas Kiarostami and attended Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. David's website is www.davidlarocca.org.