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LCSNA Spring 2021 Virtual Meeting
April 23, 2021 – April 24, 2021 EDT
Watch the LCSNA Spring 2021 Meeting presentations on YouTube.
Program Updates & Information
The final LCSNA 2021 Spring Meeting agenda and program updates, links to Wonderland (Award), other instructions, and support information will be updated here.
We recommend you come back to this location several times before the meeting. If you lose your ZOOM link or other information this is a good place to find help.
Registration
The meeting is free and open to the public. However, to ensure there are virtual seats for the event we ask that you register.
Agenda
The University of Southern California Libraries will host the Spring 2021 Meeting. All programs will take place virtually, through Zoom and other online platforms. Click here for a PDF of the program. The schedule below is in Pacific Daylight Time.
April 23: Day the First: The Tortoise Who Taught Us – Scholars Day
The goal of this half-day is to bring specialized knowledge and works of scholarship to light.
Following the speakers and a short break, the 2020-2021 USC Wonderland Award be held using Zoom. Student submissions will be available for viewing before the Award ceremony.
| Welcome Catherine Quinlan, Dean of the USC Libraries Linda Cassady, President, Lewis Carroll Society of North America |
9:30 a.m.-9:45 a.m. |
| Lewis Carroll and Reginald Southey, A Photographic Friendship Diane Waggoner |
9:45 a.m.-10:25 a.m. |
| Diane Waggoner’s talk will examine the connections between the photographic practices of Lewis Carroll and Reginald Southey. She will focus on Carroll’s and Southey’s photograph albums and explore the photographs they each took at Twyford School. Waggoner is curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, where she has curated numerous exhibitions, including The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875 and East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. In 2020, she published Lewis Carroll’s Photography and Modern Childhood with Princeton University Press. | |
| Alice and the Order of Aristotle’s Categories Eric Gerlach |
10:30 a.m.-11:10 a.m. |
| Eric Gerlach will draw connections between Aristotle’s ten logical categories—which Carroll taught to children and adults—and his storytelling approach to Wonderland, Looking-Glass, and Hunting of the Snark. Gerlach studied philosophy and religion at University of California Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. He taught the history of Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Chinese, Islamic, and European thought for 14 years and studies the relationship of meaning to Carroll’s fantasies, Poe’s detective stories, and Wittgenstein’s thought experiments. | |
| Moderated Q & A with Diane Waggoner and Eric Gerlach | 11:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m. |
| Morning Break | 11:25 a.m.-11:35 a.m. |
| CAUTION! Lewis Carroll May Be Funny, but He Is Often Hopelessly Addictive and May Even Result in Divorce! Byron Sewell |
11:35 a.m.-12:20 p.m. |
| Byron Sewell will recount a half-century’s worth of encounters with a famous, infamous, and otherwise notable set of global Carrollians. Sewell is a prolific author and illustrator who studied art at the University of Texas Austin after earning his chemical engineering degree from the University of New Mexico. His industrial design work took him around the world, where he engaged in Carrollian projects in the U.K., South Korea, Australia, and elsewhere. The Ransom Center houses his first Carroll collection, while a second collection awaits a new home. | |
| The Mythological Centers of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books Richard Kopley |
12:25 p.m.-12:55 p.m. |
| Richard Kopley will argue that the Alice books function as symmetrically constructed narratives, with stories built around significant, formal centers—such as the Cheshire Cat in Wonderland, and Humpty Dumpty in Looking-Glass. Kopley is Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University DuBois. He is the author of The Threads of The Scarlet Letter, Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries, and The Formal Center in Literature. | |
| Moderated Q & A with Byron Sewell and Richard Kopley | 12:55 p.m.-1:10 p.m. |
| Lunch and Social Hour Led by Heather Simmons |
1:10 p.m.-2:00 p.m. |
| Introduction and Tutorial for Virtual Exhibitions Curtis Fletcher and Samir Ghosh |
2:00 p.m.-2:15 p.m. |
| 42: Wonderland Award Retrospective Exhibition Tyson Gaskill and Anne-Marie Maxwell |
2:15 p.m.-3:15 p.m. |
| Wonderland Award 2020-2021 Exhibition Tyson Gaskill and Anne-Marie Maxwell |
3:15 p.m.-4:15 p.m. |
| Wonderland Award Ceremony Catherine Quinlan Linda Cassady Wonderland 2021 Judges |
4:15 p.m.-5:15 p.m. |
| Evening Social Hour Led by Heather Simmons |
5:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m. |
| Day the First Concludes Linda Cassady |
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April 24: Day the Second: Behind the Looking Glass—Voices and Visions
| Welcome Linda Cassady, President, Lewis Carroll Society of North America |
9:30 a.m.-9:45 a.m. |
| The Life of Edwin Dodgson: Brother of Lewis Carroll and Missionary to the South Atlantic Islands Caroline Luke Edward Wakeling |
9:45 a.m.-10:25 a.m. |
| Caroline Luke and Edward Wakeling will introduce and present an overview of their new book on the life of Lewis Carroll’s younger brother, Edwin Heron Dodgson. Luke and Wakeling will discuss Edwin’s early life and missionary aspirations, his work in Zanzibar, and his time on the South Atlantic Island of Tristan da Cunha. Their talk draws on extracts from Edwin’s correspondence and will outline how Luke fits into the Dodgson family.
Caroline Luke is the great, great niece of Edwin Dodgson and great granddaughter of Skeffington Hume Dodgson. In addition to her career in social work, Luke is one of two family executors of the C. L. Dodgson estate. Edward Wakeling is a longtime member of the British and North American Carroll societies, having held several officer positions, including chair, of the British society. Wakeling has written extensively on Carroll for three decades and helped organized the First International Lewis Carroll Conference at Christ Church. |
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| Reflection, Recursion, and Self-Reference: Mathematics, Surrealism and the Mind of Lewis Carroll Mark Richards |
10:30 a.m.-11:10 a.m. |
| Mark Richards will examine responses to nonsense and the appearance of nonsense as a pathway from the ridiculous to the sublime, taking his examples from the fields of mathematics and surrealism and the works of Lewis Carroll. Richards has explored Carroll’s life and work since the 1970s, with a particular focus on mathematics and nonsense. He is a former chair of the Lewis Carroll Society (UK) and former editor of The Carrollian. Richards is currently developing lewiscarrollresources.net as a collection of resources to support Carroll scholarship. | |
| Moderated Q & A with Caroline Luke, Mark Richards, and Edward Wakeling | 11:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m. |
| Brunch Break | 11:25 a.m.-12:05 p.m. |
| Dreams and Deliria: Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland and its Operatic Lineage Joe Cadagin |
12:05 p.m.-12:45 p.m. |
| Joe Cadagin will trace the lineage of opera’s long-harbored infatuation with insanity, beginning with the ubiquitous “mad scenes” of the 19th century and continuing into 20th-century surrealist dream sequences. Cadagin examines how Unsuk Chin’s 2007 Alice in Wonderland opera carries this convention into the present day while undermining its more exploitative elements. Cadagin recently earned a doctorate in musicology from Stanford University. Excerpts from his dissertation earned first place in the 2019 USC Libraries Wonderland Award. | |
| Furiouser and Spuriouser, or Unforeseen Consequences of the Democratization of Knowledge: A Musical Fairytale about the Internet after Lewis Carroll and René Descartes Kathleen Allan Jason Noble |
12:50 p.m.-1:35 p.m. |
| Furiouser and Spuriouser is a composition for 8-part choir that reimagines Wonderland as the internet and Alice (Allysse in millennial spelling) as a digital native forming early impressions of reality. The choristers create a fantastical world using narration, choral singing, and extended vocal techniques. In this presentation, Kathleen Allan and Jason Noble discuss the conceptual foundations of the piece and how they are given narrative and musical expression.
Kathleen Allan is a conductor, composer, and clinician working in early, contemporary, and symphonic repertoire. She is the Artistic Director and Conductor of the Amadeus Choir of Greater Toronto and a visiting professor at Western University. She holds a degree in composition from University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in conducting from Yale University. Jason Noble is a composer and postdoctoral fellow at Université de Montréal. A chorister and occasional conductor, Noble has composed extensively for choir, as well as other instrumental and electronic media. His research on meaning in contemporary music has been published in Music Perception and Journal of New Music Research, among other journals. |
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| Moderated Q & A with Kathleen Allan, Joe Cadagin, and Jason Noble | 1:35 p.m.-1:50 p.m. |
| Afternoon Break | 1:50 p.m.-2:00 p.m. |
| The Game of Logic in Virtual Reality Jackie Lee |
2:00 p.m.-2:40 p.m. |
| Lewis Carroll invented the Carroll Diagram in The Game of Logic (1886) to visualize the attributes of things. Jackie Lee and colleagues re-created Carroll’s riddles in virtual reality (VR) as an experiment in storytelling and new ways of learning in STEM fields. Lee will discuss and conduct a live demonstration for participants to follow the White Rabbit and learn to solve riddles in a Carrollian way through VR. Lee is the founder of ScienceVR (sciencevr.com) and a cross-disciplinary inventor in virtual and augmented reality, learning, and affective computing. He earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. from MIT’s Media Laboratory. | |
| Carroll in Japan: A Discussion with Yoshi Momma Amanda Kennell Yoshi Momma |
2:40 p.m.-3:20 p.m. |
| As the recent publication of Alice in a World of Wonderlands shows, the Alice novels are popular in Japan. Amanda Kennell and Yoshi Momma will discuss the reception of Lewis Carroll’s work and how Carroll is viewed among Japanese scholars and enthusiasts.
Amanda Kennell is an assistant teaching professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University and is working on a book, Alice in Evasion: Adaptation/Carroll/Japan about Japanese adaptations of Alice in Wonderland. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, The Journal of Popular Culture, and elsewhere. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, and her M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Yoshi Momma is a major Carroll collector and compiler of the World of Wonderlands Japanese bibliography. He is a founding member and the first chair of the Lewis Carroll Society of Japan (1994). He has been a member of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America since 1980. |
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| Moderated Q & A with Amanda Kennell, Jackie Lee, and Yoshi Momma | 3:20- p.m.-3:35 p.m. |
| Day the Second Concludes Linda Cassady |
3:35 p.m.-3:45 p.m. |
| Afternoon Social Hour Led by Heather Simmons |
3:45 p.m.-5:00 p.m. |
Speakers
 Kathleen Allan |
 Joe Cadagin |
 Richard Kopley |
 Eric Gerlach |
 Amanda Kennell |
 Jackie Lee |
 Caroline Luke |
 Yoshi Momma |
 Jason Noble |
 Mark Richards |
 Byron Sewell |
 Diane Waggoner |
 Edward Wakeling |
