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Wednesday, October 13
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12:00-13:30 • Opening Reception and Registration

13:30-14:45 • Roundtable Discussion: "The most dangerous thing"
Room 249, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu (Western Ontario)

Participants: Joyce Goggin (Amsterdam), Hans Georg Moeller (Brock), Allan Pero (Western Ontario)

14:45-15:00 • Coffee Break

15:00-17:00 • Concurrent Sessions (1.1-1.2)

Session 1.1: Cine-gamble
Room 100, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Brian Wall (Western Ontario)

1. Yun Peng (Minnesota): "Gambler, Puppet, and the Dumb Life to Live"
2. Christopher Keep (Western Ontario): "Betting on a Horse's Stride: The gambles of early cinema"
3. Kim Olynyk (Manitoba): "The Irony of American Dreams: Swindling and infinite prosperity read as a two faced coin"
4. John Vanderheide (Western Ontario): "A Bait for Something: On Buñuel's late cinematic gambling system"

Session 1.2: Gambling with/in Faith
Room 148, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Jan Plug (Western Ontario)

1. Josh Toth (Western Ontario): "The Specter of Indecision: Derrida's faith, or the gambles of deconstruction"
2. Leo Stan (McMaster): "Gambler Abraham Pascal"
3. Christopher Bundock (Western Ontario): "Augustine's Gamble: Contingency, conversion, community"
4. Aaron Parrett (Great Falls): "The Theology of Gambling"

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Thursday, October 14
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09:30-11:00 • Concurrent Sessions (2.1-2.2)

Session 2.1: Speculating, Gambling
Room 247, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Christine Roulston (Western Ontario)

1. Lisa Ng (Calgary): "Gambling or Speculation in Émile Zola's L'Argent"
2. Joyce Goggin (Amsterdam): "Upping the Ante: Tulip Fever and marketing 17th-century risk"
3. Brian Wall (Western Ontario): "'Expressionism is a gamble': Aesthetics, agency, and modernity"

Session 2.2: Interrogating Gambling Behaviour
Room 148, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Anton Allahar (Western Ontaro)

1. Joan E. Norris (Guelph) and Joseph A. Tindale (Guelph): "Exploring Meaning, Risk, and Gambling in Later Life"
2. Valerie C. Lorenz (Compulsive Gambling Center, Baltimore): TBA

11:00-11:15 • Coffee Break

11:15-12:45 • Concurrent Sessions (3.1-3.2)

Session 3.1: The Hazard of Improv: Getting badlucky
Room 148, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Christopher Bundock (Western Ontario)

1. Rodica Ieţa (Western Ontario): "Theory, Literature, and the Flux of Experience"
2. Leslie Barcza (Toronto): "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves: The romance of the improvisation"
3. Frank Davey (Western Ontario): "Theories of Aleatory Poetic Composition: Some recent North American examples"

Session 3.2: Reading and the Play of Chance
Room 225, University College
Chair: Daniel Vaillancourt (Western Ontario)

1. Kane X. Faucher (Western Ontario), "Bibliomancy: Betting on the book"
2. Brian McGrath (Emory): "'Cozen'd into Knowledge': Reading, gambling, and deception in Locke"
3. Herschel Farbman (Harvard): "Jinxed in Theory: Le Guignon for Baudelaire and Mallarmé"

12:45-13:30 • Lunch

13:30-14:45 • Keynote Address
Room 100, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Robert Young

Mihai Spariosu (Georgia at Athens), "Gambling for Empire: Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great and Hardt and Negri's Empire"

14:45-15:00 • Coffee Break

15:00-17:00 • Session 4: Victorian gamblers
Room 148, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Christopher Keep (Western Ontario)

1. Erin M. Goss (Emory): "Chance, Enchantment, and the Last Rites of Language: Thomas Carlyle"
2. Sara Malton (Cornell): "Hardy's Daring Gambler: Speculating on the spurious"
3. Jodi L. Wagner (Purdue): "Metaphorical and Rhetorical Gambles in Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities"
4. Stephanie King (McGill): "Financial Promiscuity: Speculation, gambling, and 'fallen men' in Victorian fiction"

19:30 • Conference Pub at the Graduate Club in Middlesex College [Go to events]
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Friday, October 15
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09:00-10:30 • Concurrent Sessions (5.1-5.2)

Session 5.1: Meet the Gambler's Shadow
Room 247, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Michael Gardiner (Western Ontario)

1. Ariel Fuenzalida (Western Ontario): "Hashish and Gambling: Walter Benjamin after dark"
2. Sytze Kingma (Free University Amsterdam): "Dostoevsky and Freud: Autonomy and Addiction in Gambling"
3. Gregory Brophy (Western Ontario): "Anatomy of a Crime: The criminal body under the polygraph"

Session 5.2: Life: The risky context
Room 148, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Mary Bunch (Western Ontario)

1. Timothy Wood (Rice): "Fatal Pursuits: Following as para-site"
2. Michael Allen Fox (Queen's): "Poker as a Metaphor for Life"
3. Jason S. Polley (McGill): "Betting and Being: Risk as Completion of Character in Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven"

10:30-10:45 • Coffee Break

10:45-12:45 • Concurrent Sessions (6.1-6.2)

Session 6.1:The Gamble of Practical Reason
Room 148, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Joel Faflak (Western Ontario)

1. Jeffrey Encke (Seattle): "Gambling and the Ethics of War"
2. Nigel Joseph (Western Ontario): "Safe Bets? Gaming and theory in liberal contractualism"
3. Matt Sang (Western Ontario): "Betting on Other Worlds: Kant on conviction"
4. Elias Polizoes (Western Ontario): "Some Kind of Solution"

Session 6.2: The Risk Society
Room 247, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Ariel Fuenzalida (Western Ontario)

1. Jim Cosgrave (Trent): "Gambling in the Risk Society: From Beck back to Durkheim and Goffman"
2. Hans Georg Moeller (Brock): "Risky Semantics: Luhmann on risk"
3. Jason Puskar (Harvard): "'The Metropolitan' and Mental Life: Insurance and the rise of the risk society"
4. Sytze Kingma (Free University Amsterdam): "Gambling and the Risk Society"

12:45-13:30 • Lunch

13:30-15:30 • Concurrent Sessions (7.1-7.2)

Session 7.1: The Value(s) of Gambling
Room 247, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Regna Darnell (Western Ontario)

1. Fiona Nicoll (Queensland): "Cultural Economies of Gambling Beyond the 'Problem Gambler'"
2. William Ramp (Lethbridge): "Gambling and Reciprocity in the Formation of Moral Cultures"
3. Regna Darnell (Western Ontario): "Grandma goes to the Bingo: First Nations Sociality and Nomadic Traditions of Risk Management"
4. Cathy van Ingen (Brock): "Reading Crisis: Gambling 'others' and the moral geography of a First Nations casino in 'Las Vegas North'"

Session 7.2: Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard: Gambling's open end(s)
Room 148, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Matthew Rowlinson (Western Ontario)

1. Allan Pero (Western Ontario): "'Time Enough for Countin'': Gambling and the event-effect as symptom"
2. Eyal Dotan (Tel Aviv): "Luck, Subjectivity, and the Enigma of Gambling"
3. Cristian Melchiorre (Western Ontario): "Bridge Games: Lacan's missing player"

15:30-15:45 • Coffee Break

15:45-17:00 • Keynote Address
Room 100, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Tilottama Rajan (Western Ontario)

Jean-Michel Rabaté (Pennsylvania): "Gambling on Theory/Gambling in Theory"

19:30 • Conference Banquet at Waldo's [Go to events]
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Saturday, October 16
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10:00-11:00 • Concurrent Sessions (8.1-8.2)

Session 8.1: Risking (and) Identification
Room 247, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Diana Brydon (Western Ontario)

1. Henri Boyi (Western Ontario): "Gam(bl)ing with Blackness in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God"
2. Kristen K. Poluyko (Wilfred Laurier): "Jeanette Winterson's Playing Games: Risk, reading, The Passion as 'serious game'"

Session 8.2: Gambling's Tricky Faces
Room 249, Visual Arts Builiding
Chair: Allan Pero (Western Ontario)

1. Ruggero Pierantoni (Zoagli and Genoa): "The Visual Representation of the Human Face: Old tricks, new tricks"
2. Louis Kaplan (Toronto): "Hands of Chance: On Wallace Berman's Radio/Ether Series"

11:00-11:15 • Coffee Break

11:15-12:45 • Concurrent Sessions (9.1-9.2)

Session 9.1: Gambling Time: A moment before itself
Room 247, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Walid Hamarneh (Western Ontario)

1. Christopher Bradd (York): "Doing it in Hell: Gambling with Dostoevsky, Benjamin, and Baudelaire"
2. Laura Penny (SUNY Buffalo): "You Have Not Learned to Play and Mock as a Man Ought to Play and Mock: The Affirmation of chance in Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Deleuze"
3. Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu (Western Ontario): "Lottophysics"

Session 9.2: The Gamble Within
Room 249, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Joshua Lambier (Western Ontario)

1. Dustin N. Atlas (Western Ontario): "Peirce: Gambling for immanence"
2. Alexei Procyshyn (Western Ontario): "Gambling on Totality: Dialectics and its presuppositions"
3. Jason Dockstader (Western Ontario): "The Risk of Immanence: Spinoza on contingency"

12:45-13:30 • Lunch

13:30-15:30 • Concurrent Sessions (10.1-10.2)

Session 10.1: Star in the Distance, Cup at Hand: On the chance of being human, Special Session Organized by Angela Cozea (Toronto)
Room 249, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Angela Cozea (Toronto)

1. Terry Cochran (Montréal), "My Cup Runneth Over, Infinitely"
2. Agnès Conacher (Queens), "Edging Pascal's Bet: Nature and science in Cyrano de Bergerac's Autre monde"
3. Angela Cozea (Toronto), "Drifting Away from the Continent of Human Beings"
4. Mark Asberg (Western Ontario), "The Divine Chance to be Human: Hegel's incarnating love"

Session 10.2: Poker, the Fire
Room 247, Visual Arts Building
Chair: Petra Hroch (Western Ontario)

1. Daniel Cassidy (New College, California): "The Irish Language in American Gambling Terms: Faro, monte, roulette, bluff, brag, and poker"
2. Derek Foster (Carleton): "Eliminating Chance: Theorizing poker as a game of skill"
3. Russell Brown (Toronto): "Some Preliminary Thoughts on Poker as Hermeneutic Problem"

15:30-15:45 • Coffee Break

15:45-17:00 • Keynote Address
Conron Hall (Room 224), University College
Chair: Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu

Nassim Taleb (New York), "Gambling with the Wrong Dice"

21:00 • Conference Party [Go to events]