Join us at PAMLA 2025 for a special Plenary Address with Professor Debarati Sanyal (UC Berkeley): Arts of the Border: Memory, Metamorphosis, and Migration. This plenary will take place on Saturday, November 22 (11:30 am–12:30 pm) in Grand Ballroom B/C (3rd floor).
Professor Sanyal will discuss visual representations of those on the move, the violence unleashed upon them, and the entangled histories that pulse—often invisibly—through our current border regime. Despite their powers of capture, borders are constantly breached and redrawn by unruly bodies and unbound imaginaries, by movements both orchestrated and unpredictable.
Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French, Zaffaroni Chair of Undergraduate Education, and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (2006), Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (2015), and most recently Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at the Edges of Europe (forthcoming with Fordham). Her research, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021–2022), addresses migrant resistance, biopolitics, and aesthetics in Europe’s ongoing refugee “crisis.”
Don’t miss this important conversation at the heart of PAMLA 2025’s theme: Memory and Oblivion.
RSVPs requested but not required to attend this plenary event; please log into pamla.ballastacademic.com and register via the Registration tab so we can better anticipate attendance numbers.