Registration & Coffee
Opening / Welcome
PANEL 1: RANK & GENDER IN THE EARLY MODERN AGE
Chair: Klaas Van Gelder
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 at the Campus Restaurant
KEYNOTE: CATHY SHRANK
"The Making of New Gentlemen": Social Mobility and Ambivalence in Early Modern England
Chair: Maria Pace Aquilina
Coffee refill
PANEL 2: INDIVIDUAL AGENCY AND THE COMMON GOOD: MOVING IN(TO) MODERN PARADIGMS
Chair: Maxime Louise Honinx
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 refill
PANEL 3: BEYOND EUROPE: THRESHOLDS TO THE GLOBAL MODERN
Chair: Tola Oshitelu
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
Conference Dinner (Old Town)
Coffee
PANEL 4: BETWEEN/WITHIN/BEYOND THE COLONIAL LOGIC OF MERIT
Chair: Josephine Delali Ofei
Nina Aidam
Meritocracy and Cultural Disruption in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 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 at the Campus Restaurant
KEYNOTE: MADHU KRISHNAN
Meritocracy and the Asymmetry of Literary Capital: “Independent” Publishing and African Writing in the “World Republic of Letters”
Chair: Suzanne Scafe
Coffee refill
PANEL 5: RESISTING DOMINANT PARADIGMS
Chair: Mehran Ghand
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
Reception
Wisukama Art Shop (Matonge)
30 Rue Anoul, 1050 Brussels
Dady Mbumba (CAUSE)
Rumba and Congolese Art: Meritocratic (Counter-)Imaginaries
Meritocracy in Congolese imaginations and the diaspora: a small journey through the notes of rumba, art, exile and colonization
Coffee
PANEL 6: PATHWAYS THROUGH THE MERITOCRACY: CONFORMING, RESISTING, SURPASSING NORMS?
Chair: Ceydanur Temurok
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 at the LIC
PANEL 7: UP OR OUT: MERITOCRACY AS A SPACE OF OPPORTUNITY OR CULTURAL TRAP
Chair: Cedric Van Dijck
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)
Coffee refill
READING AND CONVERSATION: ALECIA MCKENZIE
The Question of Work: Literary and Artistic Navigations
Chair: Eva Ulrike Pirker