This Is Water Symposium, Summer 2025
Join us on Zoom, Thursday, June 5th at Noon EST. / Friday, June 6th at Noon EST. / Saturday, June 7th at 5pm EST. / Sunday, June 8th at Noon Est. https://sunyorange.zoom.us/j/97185772824?pwd=2sb9HnX3lCW55yGSbcvq9Rjs7VRBNy.1
Schedule:
| 6/5 | 6/6 | 6/7 | 6/8 | |||
| EST | THURSDAY | FRIDAY | SATURDAY | SUNDAY | ||
| Moderator | Danielle Ely | Ryan Kerr | Matt Bucher | Danielle Ely | ||
| 12:00 PM | Welcome & Intros | Welcome & Intros | Welcome & Intros | |||
| 12:30 PM | Group Read: "This is Water" | Group Read: "This is Water" | Group Read: "This is Water" | |||
| 1:00 PM | Presentation: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Johnny Gentle by Ryan Kerr | Presentation: You Can't Kill Time with Your Heart: DFW and the Time of Embodiment by Cory Alix and Britt Zeldenrust | Presentation: "Fishes swim, fishes float and there is water all around. I'm lost, but I'm not stranded, yet." by Alfonso Vinassa de Regny |
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| 1:30 PM | Using Art to Talk About Art: Shklovsky, Gass, Wallace and the Aesthetic Structures of their Literary Manifestos by Katherine Sinyavin | Presentation: Gothic Reversals: The Uncanny in The Picture of Dorian Gray and “Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature” by Hannah Smart |
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| 2:00 PM | Cliches and Kenyon: Authenicity in 'Good Old Neon' and 'This is Water' by Anthony Raffin | Guest Speaker: Jacob Ford | ||||
| 2:30 PM | Presentation: "This is Composition" by Danielle S. Ely | Optional Open Forum | ||||
|   | 3:00 PM | Optional Open Forum | Guest Speaker: Jonah Matranga | Announcements & Wrap Up | ||
| 3:30 PM | Optional Open Forum | |||||
| 4:00 PM | Announcements & Wrap Up | Announcements & Wrap Up | ||||
| 4:30 PM | ||||||
| 5:00 PM | Welcome & Intros | |||||
| 5:30 PM | Group Read: "This is Water" | |||||
| 6:00 PM | Presentation: How to Think and What to Think About — Wallace, AI, and Education by Michael O'Connell | |||||
| 6:30 PM | Presentation: The encyclopedic turn – Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace in Polish translation by Łukasz Barciński, Ph.D. | |||||
| 7:00 PM | Optional Open Forum | |||||
| 7:30 PM | ||||||
| 8:00 PM | Announcements & Wrap Up | |||||
The 20th Anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” Kenyon Commencement Speech is coming up this May! If you can’t make our roundtable at the ALA conference in Boston this May, we’d love to see you in the virtual realm for a four-day Zoom symposium themed around Wallace’s monumental speech. While it may be disappointing not to see each other in person, this is an opportunity to do things we can’t do at an in-person conference, and a chance to reconnect with our friends from around the globe.
Please join us from Thursday, June 5th to Sunday, June 8th. Each day, we’ll have speakers, presentations, Q&A with special guests, and much more! A more detailed schedule will be released soon. But if you want to be involved, have a paper you’d like to present, an idea about something you’d like to see at the event, or other suggestions or questions, send an abstract and a short bio, and any scheduling needs to [email protected] by May 15.
This is a sliding-scale, donation-based event. Virtual attendees will be asked to pay what they can to raise funds for our in-person conference #DFW26, set for Austin, TX. CFP for the 2026 Conference is coming soon. We hope to see you down the road!