Speakers
Our speakers for the inaugural ERAH Conference, 2024, are:
Dr. Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University
Marta Figlerowicz teaches comparative literature at Yale University. She is a theorist of literature from the eighteenth century to the present and of contemporary visual media. Working in over ten languages, she studies how aesthetic objects depict and mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication. Her first two books, Flat Protagonists (2016) and Spaces of Feeling (2017) reflect on trans-personal and transcultural communication within the purview of literary studies. Her current book in progress, It Must Be Possible: Modernity and Transcultural Knowledge, offers an intellectual history of the entanglements of anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from the perspectives of ethnically, racially, or (geo)politically marginalized writers. Alongside her academic writing, she comments on contemporary American and Eastern European literature, film, and politics in venues such as Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Paris Review, and Boston Review. She is a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.
Dr. Kristina Downs, Tarleton State University
Kristina Downs is the Executive Director of the Texas Folklore Society and Assistant Professor of English at Tarleton State University. She holds a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University and an MA in Folklore from George Mason University. She was managing editor of the Journal of Folklore Research for five years and is coeditor of the edited volume Advancing Folkloristics (Indiana University Press, 2021). Her research focuses mostly on legends, particularly the ways legends interact with history, literature, true crime, and digital culture. She has appeared as a folklore expert on the History Channel’s The UnXplained and the Tubi documentary Scariest Monsters in the World. She is currently working on a book that examines vernacular discourse on serial killers as contemporary monster legends.
