Tickets available HERE
***
Tickets available HERE ***
Disgusting Civilisations:
Decay, Degeneracy, and the Aesthetics of Revulsion
An Interdisciplinary Conference in Decadence Studies
14-15 May 2026
Institute of English Studies
Senate House, University of London
From the sickly perfume of overripe empires to the aesthetic pleasures of putrefaction, decadence has always flirted with disgust. This conference invites scholars to explore how civilisations rot – and how that rot becomes legible, legendarily so, through literature, art, and cultural production. Disgust, in the decadent imagination, is not merely a symptom of decline – it is a form of knowledge, a style, even a politics.
This conference aims to bring together voices from literature, philosophy, visual culture, performance studies, and cultural history to consider the abject, the filthy, the grotesque, and the revolting – not only as signs of civilisational breakdown but as the very material from which decadent visions are born.
What does it mean to call a civilisation ‘disgusting’? Is it a moral judgement? A sensory one? An aesthetic or ideological label?
Programme
Day 1: 14 May
9.00: Registration
9.30: Welcome from the Decadence Research Centre
9.45: Keynote
Chair: Jane Desmarais
Matthew Potolsky ‘Decadence, Finance, and the Uses of Rome’
11.00: Refreshments / Comfort break
11.30: Panel 1: Decadence and Putrefaction
Chair: TBC
Rita Dirks, ‘Dying Flesh and Desire in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian’
Sebastian A. Kukavica, ‘Abominable Putrefaction of the Western Civilization: Post-Decadent Aesthetics of Decay in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Rigodon’
Bénédicte Coste, ‘From Ugliness to Disgust: Ouida’s Strategic Decadent Rhetoric in her Fin de Siècle Writings’
12.45: Lunch
2.00: Panel 2: Orientalism, Empire, and Disgust
Chair: TBC
Adriana Rodríguez-Alfonso, ‘National Germs and the Contagious Spark of Colonial Independence in Fin-de-Siècle Spain’
Cherrie Kwok, ‘Empire’s Disgusting Allure in Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates’
Charlotte Sas, ‘A Geopoetics of the Indigestible: Disgust, Form, and Colonial Matter in Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal’
Hao-Yu Hu, ‘Eroticized East and Exoticized Decay: Oscar Wilde’s Queer Orientalism in The Picture of Dorian Gray’
3.15: Tea
3.45: Panel 3: War and Bloodshed
Chair: TBC
Mirjam Hinrikus, ‘First World War as Nietzschean-Dionysian Chaos: A. H. Tammsaare’s Play Juudit (1921)’
Silvio Foce, ‘A Gorefest Against Trauma: The Semiotics of Bloodshed and Graphic Violence in the Battle Descriptions of Corippus’ Iohannis’
Elena Borelli, ‘“And the World was Theirs”: The “Filthy Tribes” from the East and the Fall of Civilisation in Giovanni Pascoli’s “Gog And Magog”’
5.00: Drinks reception
Day 2: 15 May
9.00: Registration
9.30: Panel 4: Corporeal Corruptions
Chair: Jessica Gossling
Maisie Drummond, ‘Ottessa Moshfegh: Consumption, Expulsion, Terrorism’
Felix Carr, ‘Revolting Affect: George Gissing, Nietzsche and the Noxious Depths of Ressentiment’
Mikko Välimäki, ‘Gendered Disgust and the Fall of Civilisations: Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s seductresses’
10.45: Refreshments / Comfort break
11.15: Panel 5: Purgation and Degeneration
Chair: Alice Condé
Jiangtao Xiong, ‘Disgust and Fine Death: The Social Meaning of Homeric Burial’
VJ René, ‘Perversion and Sympathy: A. C. Swinburne and the uses of disgust’
Michael Russo, ‘Cy Twombly’s Mirror of New York: Degeneracy and Decay in 1970s American Painting’
12.30: Lunch
1.30: Panel 6: Death, decay, and the corpse
Chair: TBC
Kostas Boyiopoulos, ‘Sublated Disgust: Gabrielle Wittkop’s Late Decadence’
Mercedes Lopez Rodriguez, ‘Literature Beyond the Grave: Jorge Isaacs’s Exhumation and the Aesthetic Construction of the Dead Literary Hero’
Robert Marcoux, ‘Vermin and Bodily Decay in Medieval Cadaver Imagery’
2.45: Panel 7: Rot, Miasma, and Contagion
Chair: TBC
Keith A. Moser, ‘Embracing the Abject: Microbial Life, Disgust, Putrefaction, and the Politics of the Anthropocene’
Dane Sutherland, ‘Things Dismal and Things Worse: An Entropology of the Neural Mediascape’
Stuart McWilliams, ‘On the Turn: Scent, Decomposition, and All That Follows’
4.00: Tea
4.30: Plenary
Chair: Adam Alston
Jenkin van Zyl
5.30: Close of conference
Contact Us
Please email drc@gold.ac.uk with any queries about Disgusting Civilisations.
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