The United Students Society
(The Department of North American Literature and Culture, University of Łódź)
Invites you to participate in its 11th student conference:
Deadly Calculations:
Technology and Violence in North
American Literature and Culture
Saturday, 20 May 2023
The Faculty of Philology, University of Łódź (Rooms TBA)
Keynote speaker:
dr Marek Wojtaszek
(the Faculty of International and Political Studies, University of Łódź)
In 1918 the German chemist Fritz Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the
creation of the Haber-Bosch process, still used today to raise the efficiency of the
production of fertilizers. However, this great invention that accounts for one-third of
annual global food production casts a dark shadow. During his experiments, the same
scientist revolutionized chemical warfare, which directly led to the first mass use of
chlorine gas in the Second Battle of Ypres during World War I. Technological progress has
its darker, more violent side: for every marvel of human ingenuity that makes our lives
more comfortable, there is another that may imperil these very lives, or even shatter
them. Indeed, as American behaviorist B. F. Skinner once stated, “The real question is not
whether machines think but whether men do.” North American culture is filled with
stories of rogue artificial intelligences bringing about the end of the world, new methods
of surveillance invading every aspect of privacy, or cutting-edge military devices wiping
out entire cities.
It is such constantly pushed limits of technological progress and its attendant suffering as
represented in cultural productions that we wish to investigate in Deadly Calculations:
Violence and Technology in North American Literature and Culture – the eleventh
conference organized by the United Students Society, an extracurricular reading group
under the auspices of the Department of North American Literature and Culture at the
University of Łódź. We invite doctoral candidates, as well as undergraduate and graduate
students to submit abstracts related to US American and Canadian literature and
culture that include, but are not limited to, the following:
● sacrifices for technological progress
● technological catastrophes
● technology in service of war
● violent modernisation
● cyberpunk and transhumanism
● artificial intelligence
● cyberbullying
● spread of fake information
● invasive surveillance
● epidemics and pandemics
● technophobia now and in the past
● technological utopias and dystopias
● ethical dilemmas connected to technological progress
Please send an abstract of 150-200 words to the following address:
ussconf.technoviolence@gmail.com. The deadline for the submissions is March 19,
2023. There is no conference fee.
dr Krzysztof Majer
dr Justyna Fruzińska
mgr Barbara Pawlak (conference secretary)