Friday, April 10, 2026
Friedman Hall, Room 108
3:30 - 4:00pm – Arrival and Registration (light snacks will be provided)
4:00 - 4:15pm – Welcome & Opening Remarks
4:15 - 5:45pm – Panel 1: The Stakes of Interpretation
Faculty Respondent: Professor Nancy Khalek
Hajra Farooqui, “The Untidy Other: Archival Desire and Recovery in the Maryam Jameelah Papers”
Jennifer Greenberg, “Revelation and Feminist Nostalgia”
Xingyu Wang, “Buddhism in Everyday Life: Reading Feng Mengzhen's (1548-1606) Diary in Late Ming China”
Emily King, “The Ethics of Interpretation: Simone Weil's Notebooks and the Problem of the Absent Author”
5:45 - 6:00pm – Break
6:00 - 7:30pm – Keynote
Dr. Shenila Khoja-Moolji, “Nostalgia and the Digital Work of Succession after Aga Khan IV”
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Andrews House, Room 110 – The White Family Salon
8:30 - 9:30am – Breakfast
9:30 - 11:00am – Panel 2: Place
Faculty Respondent: Professor Daniel Vaca
Christian Pattavina, “Made for TV! Ritual, Mediation, and Broadcast Nostalgia at Christ Cathedral”
Mina Quesen, “Fangs in the Modern Man: Crafting Vampire County”
Nathan Tucker, “‘History as It Really Was’: Horace Sorenson's Pioneer Village and the Mormon Historical Imagination”
11:00 - 11:15am – Break
11:15 - 12:45pm – Panel 3: Temporality
Faculty Respondent: Professor Stephen Bush
Cecelia (Celie) Fischer, “Jewish Historicism, Counter-History, and Reversing the Gaze: Moses Mendelssohn and Abraham Joshua Heschel on Christianity and Covenant”
Marie-Louise James, “Nostalgia and Utopia: Dialectical Twins from Bloch to Boym”
Sam Herrmann, “Geared to the times, but anchored to the Rock: The Value Form and Evangelicalism’s Temporal Aesthetics”
12:45 - 1:45pm – Lunch
1:45 - 3:15pm – Panel 4: Aesthetics and Media
Faculty Respondent: Professor Kera Street
Liz Vukovic, “Christian Homemaking in Digital Space: Nostalgia, Gender, and Hidden Economy”
Terra Sage Wallin, “Whose Tradition? Whose Ancestors? Ecological Nostalgia, Fabricated Heritage, and Right-Wing Ecologism in Digital Space”
Karis Ryu, “Retelling the Marriage Plot: Racial Representation and Revisionist Fantasy in Mr. Malcolm's List (2022)”
Chase Viscuse, “Oh, Play Me Some Mountain Music: Serpent Handling, Nostalgia, and the Making of Sacred Time”
3:15 - 3:30pm – Coffee & Snacks
3:30 - 5:00pm – Panel 5: Memory/Post-memory
Faculty Respondent: Professor Leela Prasad
Eugene Goma Igho, “Inherited Wounds: Post-Memory, Oral History, and Religious Identity in Northeastern Nigeria”
Hatty Lee, “Babel and modernity, a work in progress”
Arkadeep (Arka) Mitra, “Nostalgia as a Historical Problem: An Idealization of the Hindu Past in Medieval Bengali Mangal Kavyas, or Benediction Poetry”
Robin Brown, “Death Meditation in the MAGA Worldview: Nostalgia, Mourning, and Political Theology”
6:30 pm – Conference Dinner for Participants
