GRIEF IN CONVERSATION
EGSA Annual Conference 2026
Schedule
Conference Opening Night
Guest Lecture Series: Literary Futures
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m.
Location: Desmarais Hall (DMS)
Room 1120, floor 1
55 Laurier Avenue East
Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5
Hosts: Dr. Emelia Quinn and Sahar Hamrouni
Introduction: Where Figuration Meets Feeling: On Grief in Conversation
Title of Presentation: Trans Poetics: Figuration, Embodiment and Dissent
Name: Dr. Trish Salah
Bio: Trish Salah is an associate professor of Gender Studies, English, and Creative Writing at Queen’s University and the author of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1 and Wanting in Arabic—winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Her recent writing appears in such collections as Other Influences: an Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry; Gendertrash from Hell; and Sharp Pink Claws. She is the co-editor of special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and of Arc Poetry Magazine and a regular editor at the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry.
EGSA Reception & Registration
6:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m.
Location: DMS 1110, floor 1
EGSA Conference day 1
Coffee & Treats
9:00 a.m.–9:30 a.m.
Location: Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS)
Room 6004, floor 6
120 University Private,
Ottawa, ON K1N 9A7
EGSA Conference Opening Address
9:30 a.m.–9:45 a.m.
Location: FSS 6032, floor 6
Speakers: Lina Svadkovskaia and Nafas Asgaritehrani
1.1: Decolonizing Queer Subjectivities
9:45 a.m.–10:45 a.m.
Location: FSS 6032, floor 6
Chair: Sahar Hamrouni
Session Overview: This panel examines how queer subjectivities are constructed through text and media by engaging with displacement, violence, and identity formation while reconfiguring grief through decolonial frameworks.
1. Wayward Utopia: The Queer Immigrant Woman as Living Archive of Grief
Speaker: Nafas Asgaritehrani (she/her)
2. Specters of Lost Images: Affects of Trans Grief in the Films of Jane Schoenbrun
Speaker: Patrick Poulin (they/them/any)
1.2: Re-imagining Conversations around Grief
11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Location: FSS 6032, floor 6
Chair: Liya Izmukhanova
Session Overview: This interdisciplinary panel brings non-fiction literature into conversation with urban planning, education, and communication studies to broaden our understanding of grief as a natural social condition meant to be collectively mediated and expressed.1. (re)Negotiating Grief: Emotional Dislocation in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Notes on Grief
Speaker: Liya Izmukhanova
2. Til Death Do Us Part: Reimagining the Role of Urban Planning in Palliative and End-of-Life Care
Speaker: Tammy Ma
3. The University in Multispecies Ruins: Student Grief and More-Than-Human Pedagogies
Speaker: Steve Tu (he/him)
4. The Impossible Conversation
Speakers: Gustavo Haiden de Larcerda and Kevin Ah-Sen (remote)
Lunch
12:15 p.m.–1:15 p.m.
Location: FSS 6004, floor 6
1.3: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: From the Middle Ages to Modernity
1:15 p.m.–2:15 p.m.
Location: FSS 6032, floor 6
Chair: Jack O’Flaherty
Session Overview: This panel explores how literature from different temporal and cultural contexts often aestheticizes nostalgia and loss as a consolatory response to political upheaval, historical trauma, and oppression.1. When Spanish Kingdoms Fall: Exile, Nostalgia, and Loss in Muslim and Jewish Andalusian Poetry
Speaker: Elias Baymout
2.Loyal Bandits and Treacherous Officials: The Representation of Song Dynasty Loyalism and Warfare in Late Imperial Prose Vernacular Fiction
Speaker: Samuel Minden (they/them)
3. Forbidding Mourning? Aesthetic Consolation and Its Limits in John Donne and Adrienne Rich
Speaker: Isabella Seales
1.4: Haunting Pasts: Reconciling Traumatic Memories
2:30 p.m.–3:45 p.m.
Location: FSS 6032, floor 6
Chair: Nafas Asgaritehrani
Session Overview: The papers in this panel examine how contemporary literature and film reflect and reconcile persistent and oftentimes haunting memories and the limitations of ordinary language to express them.1. When the Heir Looms: The Horror of Grief Across Space, Time, and Bodies in Hereditary (2018)
Speaker: Sahar Hamrouni
2. Forgiving But Not Forgetting: Trauma, Postmemory and Haunting in Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts
Speaker: Emma-Jane Hill
3. Listening for the Switching “I”: Polyvocal Subjectivity and the Ethics of Mediation in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
Speaker: Sara Khalighi
4. Parsing the Postpartum: Procreative Grief and the Limits of Language in Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery
Speaker: Paria Rahmani
EGSA Conference Keynote Address
4:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m
Name: Dr. Anna Thomas (she/her)
Bio: Anna Thomas is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is currently working on a book project that examines the relationship between ethics and form in African American and Caribbean literature. Her book project, Forms of Rearrangement, explores ethics across diverse contexts of oppression. She argues that subaltern subjects articulate ethics through “rearrangement,” inhabiting familiar ethical categories to resignify and redeploy their meanings in literature and archival texts. Key to her argument is the category of “habit,” which spans virtue ethics and phenomenology, and also encompasses the violence of racialized labour and the small scale of private action. She studies, then, the cohabitations of ethics and racialization, with particular attention to what she interprets as both fields’ interest in “formation,” and she proceeds to examine the relays between formation and literary form. From archival letters to slave narratives (Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs) to conjure tales (Charles Chesnutt) to travel narratives (Mary Seacole, Richard Wright) to the novel (V.S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid), her book examines how these complex intersections are navigated to trace how comparative diasporas contend with, confront, and redeploy “difference” and “unevenness” as both a question of ethics and aesthetics.
EGSA Conference Social Night
7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.
Location: Father & Sons Restaurant
112 Osgoode St.
Ottawa, ON K1N 6S1
Details: Join us for our Conference Social Night at Father & Sons Restaurant on the University of Ottawa campus! A longstanding campus favourite, Father & Sons has been serving the uOttawa community since 1967, making it one of the university’s most historic and beloved gathering spots. This is a wonderful opportunity to unwind, meet fellow graduate students and conference participants, and enjoy an upbeat and welcoming atmosphere. We hope to see you there!
EGSA Conference day 2
Coffee & Treats
9:30 a.m.–10:00 a.m.
Location: FSS 6004, floor 6
2.1: Grief in Diasporic and Post-Colonial Narratives
10:15 a.m.–11:15 a.m.
Location: FSS 6032, floor 6
Chair: Jessica Szoros
Session Overview: The papers in this panel analyze how Black Atlantic, Korean, and East Asian diasporic narratives mobilize grief in the face of cultural erasure and use it as a site of continued remembrance.1. Black Girl Grief: Adultification, Witnessing, and Water in Narratives of Sibling Loss
Speaker: Isaiah Washington (remote)
2. “Can the present save the past? Can the living save the dead?”: The Body as Political Vessel and Memorial Conduit in the Works of Han Kang
Speaker: Samanwita Sen (remote)
3. Coming Undone with Each Other: Life Writing and the Politics of Grief in North American East Asian Diasporic Communities
Speaker: Maxx Kaufman
2.2: Re-Making the Self: Exploring Death, Fragmentation, and Disruption
11:30 a.m.–12:45 p.m.
Location: FSS 6032, floor 6
Chair: Natalie Cunderlik
Session Overview: Bringing together papers on science fiction, modernist literature, and autoethnographic research, this panel poses questions about death, temporal disruption, and corporeal and psychic fragmentation, exploring how meaning-making helps reclaim humanity after loss.1. The Duality of Death: Grief, Science Fiction, and the Destruction of the Holistic Self in The Tiger Flu and Soma
Speaker: Jessica Szoros
2. Estranged Time: The Temporalities of Grief in Science Fiction
Speaker: Crystal Powell
3. Reclaiming the Living Personality: Nature, Modernity, and Trauma in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”
Speaker: Nicholas Perez (remote)
4. Between Storytelling & Study: Autoethnography, Child Loss and Organ Donation
Speaker: Maryam De Groef
Lunch
12:45 p.m.–1:45 p.m.
Location: FSS 6004, floor 6
2.3: Re-Writing Narratives: Dealing with Grief through Creative Writing
1:45 p.m.–2:45 p.m.
Location: FSS 6032, floor 6
Chair: Kendra Guidolin
Session Overview: This session looks at creative writing as a process of grieving—of attempting to utter that which is often unutterable. Indeed, it acknowledges grief as not a singular moment in time but rather, a process that demands to be felt—to be lived—over and over again. In this session, our three panelists offer creative works that explore the experience of grieving from diasporic, feminist, and queer perspectives, illustrating how grief is both an individual and collective experience. Through their works, we recognize grief as it occurs in nature, across continents and cultures, and between generations.
1. “Flight Risk”
Speaker: Kristie Patterson
2. “The Conquest”
Speaker: Youssef Wasef
3. "Drift"
Speaker: Katrina Wilcox
EGSA Conference Closing Address
3:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m
Name: Ben Ladouceur
Bio: Ben Ladouceur is the author of a novel, I Remember Lights, and two poetry collections, Otter and Mad Long Emotion. His work has received the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize, the National Magazine Award for Poetry, the Earle Birney Prize, the Gerald Lambert Memorial Award, the Thomas Morton Fiction Prize, and the Archibald Lampman Award, and has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a bpNichol Chapbook Award. He has completed writer’s residencies at the Al Purdy A-Frame and the University of Ottawa, where he is also currently teaching the fourth-year poetry capstone class.