Date: February 5 and February 6, 2026
Format: Hybrid
Venue: University of Manitoba and online via Zoom
IMPORTANT: THE SCHEDULE IS BASED ON US/CANADIAN CENTRAL TIME
Thursday, February 5, 2026
ROOM: 307 Tier building
Zoom link
Coffee and tea, 9:45 a.m.
Opening Greetings 10:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.
Vanessa Warne – Professor, Acting Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Manitoba
Jorge Nállim – Professor, Acting Head, Department of History; Director, Institute for the Humanities, University of Manitoba
Keynote Speaker 10:15 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
Alex Sager
Professor of Philosophy and University Studies, Portland State University
What If Refugees Designed Asylum
Section I. PHILOSOPHIES AND GENEALOGIES OF MIGRATION AND EXILE 11:30 a.m. - 12:35 p.m.
Mariya Shymchyshyn
Professor, Kyiv National Linguistics University; Visiting Scholar, University of Manitoba
The Drama of Migration: From Abraham’s Exodus to Contemporary Walls
Sujoy Barman
PhD Research Scholar, Ganpat University
Frantz Fanon and Negro Existentialism: A Study of Postcolonial Abandonment Neurosis
Fadime Apaydin
PhD Student, Religious Studies, University of California, Riverside
An In-Depth Examination of Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes in the United States
Lunch Break 12:35 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Food will be available at the conference’s room on first come/first serve basis
Section II. POSTCOLONIAL, DALIT, AND FRANCO-ALGERIAN REFUGEE NARRATIVES 1:30 p.m. - 2:35 p.m.
Ramit Samaddar
Assistant Professor of English, Jadavpur University
Narrating Bengali Dalit Refugee Experience: Adhir Biswas’s Deshbhager Smriti and Manoranjan Byapari’s Itibritte Chandal Jibon
Ghiat Djamel Eddine
PhD Candidate, EFL University, Hyderabad
Silence as Inherited Trauma: Postmemory and Franco-Algerian Exile in Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge
Hamdoune Yassine
Independent Researcher, Agadir, Morocco
Identity in Transit: Transnation and Mapping Subjectivity in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005)
Section III. MEMORY, TRAUMA, AND POSTMEMORY IN TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS 2:45 p.m. - 3:50 p.m.
Bes Bajraktarević
PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Dementia as a Meta-Mnemonic Apparatus in Saša Stanišić’s Post-Migratory Search for “Origins”
Liudmyla Harmash
Professor, H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University; Visiting Researcher, University of Tours
Text as Memorisation: Writing as a Technology of Memory-Making in Wartime Migration
Manodip Chakraborty
Assistant Professor of English, TKR College of Engineering; Research Scholar, IIT Guwahati
Affective Domain and the In/Out Paradigm: A Comparative Study on the Non-Fictional Fiction of Majuli Island
Section IV. ROUTES, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND MATERIALITIES OF EXILE 4:00 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.
Cornel Bogle
Assistant Professor of English, Simon Fraser University
Routes of Return: Aviation Infrastructure and Differential Mobility in Dionne Brand’s “Sketches in Transit…Going Home”
Shepherd Steiner
Associate Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art, University of Manitoba
Technical Exile and Symbolic Return: Hylomorphism, Mnemotechnics and Sacrifice in David Smith’s Agricola Series
Friday, February 6, 2026
ROOM: Cross Common Room, 108 St. John’s College
Zoom link
Coffee and tea, 8:45 a.m.
Section V. EXILE, DEPORTATION, AND CULTURAL MEMORY 9:00 a.m. - 10:20 a.m.
Nataliia Troinikova
Independent Researcher, Kassel, Germany
Rootlessness and Sustaining Identity within the Artistic Ukrainian Movement
Tetiana Starostenko
Doctoral Student, H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University
The Modalities of Domestic and Alien Chronotope in Post-2022 Ukrainian Military Epoch Poetry
Ludmyla Skoryna
Associate Professor, Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University of Cherkasy
Home, Land, Identity: Literary Representations of the Immigrant Experience in the Prose of Illia Kyriiak and Ulas Samchuk
Svitlana Kryvoruchko
Professor, H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University
The Deportation of the Crimean Tatars: Historical Memory (The film Homeward, 2019, by Nariman Aliev)
Section VI. LOST HOMELAND AND DIASPORIC WRITING (Papers in Ukrainian) 10:30 a.m. - 11:20 a.m.
Kostyantyn Holoborodko
Professor, H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University
Artistic and Semantic Content “I Am an Exile” in the Linguistic Thinking of Oleksandr Oles of the Emigration Period
Olena Varenikova
Associate Professor, H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University
Ukraine as a “Lost Homeland” in the Poetry of the New York Group
Section VII. EXILE, CHILDHOOD, AND INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY 11:30 a.m. - 12:20 p.m.
Kimberly del Busto Ramírez
Professor, City University of New York
Exile, Memory, and Institutional Authority in Dramatic Representations of Operation Pedro Pan
Nguyen H. Thi-tho
Independent Researcher
Between Compliance and Quiet Resistance: Transnational Female Creative Workers in Southeast Asian Short Story (A Comparative Reading of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Black-Eyed Women and Merlinda Bobis’s White Turtle)
Gabriela Zimkowska-Wisłocka
University of Wrocław
Chronotopes of Exile: Diasporic Identity and Soviet Deportation in Children’s and Young Adult Narratives
Keynote Speaker 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Peggy Levitt
Professor, Mildred Lane Kemper Chair of Sociology, Wellesley College
Co-Founder, Global (De)Centre
Move Over, Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look at, and Learn
Concluding Remarks 1:30 p.m.
Mariya Shymchyshyn
