Affect: Memory, Aesthetics, and Ethics

AFFECT: MEMORY, AESTHETICS, AND ETHICS
18-20 September 2015, The Fort Garry Hotel, Winnipeg, Manitoba

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor,
Department of  English,
University of Chicago
John T. Cacioppo, Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service
Professor, Department of
Psychology and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neuroscience,
University of
Chicago
Ronald de Sousa, Emeritus Professor, Department of Philosophy, University
of Toronto

SEMINARS:
Affect and David Hume: Amy Schmitter – Professor of Philosophy, University
of Alberta
Affect and Charles Darwin: Daniel M. Gross – Associate Professor of
English, University of California, Irvine
Affect and William James: Isobel Armstrong – Senior Research Fellow of the
Institute of English Studies and Professor Emeritus, Birkbeck, University
of London.
Affect and Melanie Klein: Noreen Giffney –Lecturer in Psychoanalytic
Studies, Birkbeck,
University of London.

From affect as a cognitive phenomenon, through emotion as a motive for
creativity, to empathy as a spur for community action and policy
development, to the feeling that we belong in a given physical, social or
cultural environment, affect is a significant but complex feature of our
lived experience. Research on affect has progressed rapidly in recent
years, owing to an expanding appreciation of its central role in guiding
human attitudes, decision-making, and actions and owing also to
developments in technology that have permitted more precise,
moment-to-moment measures of affective response. This conference will
accordingly provide the kind of multidisciplinary forum that promises to
be particularly productive in exploring the multifaceted nature of affect
and of its influences on culture and lived experience. The goal of the
conference is to engage academics and students from a broad range of
disciplines in discussions and explorations of the social, ethical,
political and cultural impact of affect and on the expression of emotion
in individual experience and in the public realm.