Dr. Chelsea Largent
Lecturer, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Keynote Address: “Going Vegetal: Rooted Self-Exile”
This keynote address will explore how forms of estrangement open new ways of understanding identity, relationality and belonging. Largent’s work, including her dissertation, “Antisocial Femininity: Writing the Relational in Isolation,” traces how self-imposed withdrawal from social structures is both a site of misogynistic backlash and a mode of recreating the self outside dominant norms of modernity, bringing 19th-century French decadence into dialogue with contemporary feminist and queer theory.