Registration & Coffee
Opening / Welcome
Panel 1
RANK & GENDER IN THE EARLY MODERN AGE
Xiao Wang
Debating the Source of Gentlemanly Honour in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida
Paul Arblaster
“Raised to Offices and Dignities by their Lawful Lord”: Recognition of Merit in the Journalistic Rhetoric of Early Seventeenth-Century Antwerp
Andrew Hiscock
“All sprang but from one woman and one man, Then how doth Gentry come to rise and fall?”: Aemilia Lanyer and the Textual Politics of Recognition in Jacobean England
Lunch
Keynote: Cathy Shrank
"The Making of New Gentlemen": Social Mobility and Ambivalence in Early Modern England
Coffee break
Panel 2
INDIVIDUAL AGENCY AND THE COMMON GOOD: MOVING IN(TO) MODERN PARADIGMS
Thomas Rommel
"…the Best of all Improvers": Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations as a Narrative on Meritocratic Entitlement
Carolin Gebauer
Writing against Male Narratives of (Social) Mobility: Feminist Voices from Wollstonecraft to Woolf
Coffee break
Panel 3
BEYOND EUROPE: THRESHOLDS TO THE GLOBAL MODERN
Ehsan Zivaralam
From Stage to State: The Role of Early Iranian Playwriting in Shaping Meritocracy
Kingsley Brempong Ohene Adu
Indigenous Meritocracies and Colonial Hierarchies: Rethinking Social Mobility in Casely-Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound and Sekyi’s The Anglo-Fanti
Ekaterina Morozova
Inventing the Poet: Mayakovsky, Intermediality, and the Meritocratic Spirit of the Russian Avant-Garde
Coffee
Panel 4
BETWEEN/WITHIN/BEYOND THE COLONIAL LOGIC OF MERIT
Nina Aidam
Meritocracy and Cultural Disruption in Ngugi wa Thongo’s The River Between
Asante Lucy Mtenje
“Sikusinja’s Success deserves all the Praise?!”: Examining the Myth of Meritocracy in J.W. Gwengwe’s Sikusinja ndi Gwenembe
Angelique Golding
From ATCAL to Wasafiri: Challenging Meritocratic Narratives in British Education and Literature
Lunch
Keynote: Madhu Krishnan
Meritocracy and the Asymmetry of Literary Capital: “Independent” Publishing and African Writing in the “World Republic of Letters”
Coffee
Panel 5
RESISTING DOMINANT PARADIGMS
Aida Banakar
Staging Meritocracy: Gender, Power, and Resistance in Bahram Beyzaei’s Theater
Samantha Wharton
Black Women Writing against the Grain: Migration, Subjectivity, and Literary Recognition
Coffee
Panel 6
PATHWAYS THROUGH THE MERITOCRACY: CONFORMING, RESISTING, SURPASSING NORMS?
Marie Rose Arong
Collaboration and Complicity as Pathways to Merit in Anglophone Filipino Novels
Yiyi He
Confessions of a Model Minority: Meritocratic Complicity and Resistance in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015)
Uhuru Phalafala
Political and Spiritual Dimensions of Play in 21st Century Black Feminist Poetry
Lunch
Panel 7
UP OR OUT: MERITOCRACY AS A SPACE OF OPPORTUNITY OR CULTURAL TRAP
Sabine Hillen
Le Mérite et les Passions Tristes: Edouard Louis’s Engagement with Meritocratic Ideas
Iga Nowicz
Derailing Meritocracy: Ein schönes Ausländerkind by Toxische Pommes (2024)
Michaela Oberwinkler
Meritocracy, AI, and the Ethics of Creation: Rethinking the Power of Language in Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo (2024)
Closing panel