A workshop on hotels in literature, featuring presentations by students of the 4th-year module “Modernist Fiction,” taught by Anna Despotopoulou, Department of English, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2022-23)
9 January 2023
Student Workshop
School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
25-26 June 2022
Workshop
Hotels & Crisis: Historical and Cultural Perspectives
A workshop co-sponsored by the Tourism History Working Group and Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Guelph, where ‘The British Hotel in War and the Transition to Peace, 1914-22’ project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, is based, and by HOTEMS.
London, UK
9-10 September 2021
Keynote Speakers
Andrew Thacker, Nottingham Trent University
Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Glasgow University
Organizing Committee:
Athanasios Dimakis and Chryssa Marinou, Postdoctoral Researchers, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Academic Committee:
Anna Despotopoulou and Efterpi Mitsi, Professors, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Funding by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation
9-10 September 2021
International Symposium:
Literary Hotels
(Athens time zone)
Thursday, September 9
9:30-10:00 Registration and Welcome
Aspasia Velissariou, Chair of the Department of English,
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
10:00 – 11:30 Hotels in Times of War and Crisis
Chair: Anna Despotopoulou, National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens
Robbie Moore – Online, University of Tasmania
Katherine Mansfield and May Sinclair in the Wartime Grand Hotel
Fiona Tomkinson – Online, Nagoya University
The Politics and Poetics of Space in Arnold Bennett’s Hotels and Boarding Houses
Athanasios Dimakis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
“No Longer a Hotel”: Colonial Hotel Decadence in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet
Juanjuan Wu – Online, University of Melbourne
Eastern Hotels, Modern Mobilities and Western Women in China, 1914-1924
11:45-13:15 The Greek Hotel
Chair: Chryssa Marinou, National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens
Mathilde Pyrli, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens/ELIA/MIET
The Athenian Hotel in Transition: from Inns to Grand Hôtels, 1840-1910
Efterpi Mitsi, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
George Gissing’s Grand and Modest Hotels in Late Nineteenth-Century Athens
Polly Hember – Online, Royal Holloway, University of London
Stirring the “sub-aqueous memory” in H.D.’s Hotel Mira-Mare
Vassilis Letsios – Online, Ionian University
Ithacas: Cavafy of Travel, Ships, Hotels
13:15 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30-15:30 Keynote
Andrew Thacker – Online, Nottingham Trent University
‘“Rest. Stay.” Life in the Hotels of Katherine Mansfield
Chair: Anna Despotopoulou, National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens
15:45 – 17:15 Hotel theories and designs
Chair: Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Univ. of Glasgow
John Hoffmann, Philipps University Marburg
“Grand Hotel Theory”
Rajesh Heynickx, KU Leuven
The Hotel Lobby as a Vortex in Habsburg Vienna
Bettina Matthias, Middlebury College
Performing Belonging in Early 20th Century Literary Hotels and the Case of Rich Americans
Bruce Peter – Online, Glasgow School of Art
The Prototype Jet Age Hotels
17.15-18:00 Coffee break
18:00 – 19:30 Hotel Holidays
Chair: Athanasios Dimakis, National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens
Shawna Ross – Online, Texas A&M University
A Landslide at the Pension Bertolini: Anti-Tourism and Liberal Humanism in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View
Allan Pero – Online, University of Western Ontario
“Found his anxiety frothing”: Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure, and the Hotel as Camp Allegory
Joel Hawkes – Online, University of Victoria
A Performance of the Hotel Welcome (1925-1926), and its Remains in Mary Butts’s “House Party”
Amy Foley – Online, Providence College
The Monotonous New in Kafka’s Hotel Diaries
Friday, September 10
10:00 – 11:30 Crime à la Moderne: Memory, Perception, and Mobility in Hotel Crime Narratives
Chair: Nikos Filippaios, Univ. of Ioannina
Caius Dobrescu – Online, University of Bucharest
The Hotel at the Edge of The Abyss: Modernities, Mobilities, and Mysteries in R. G. Waldeck’s Athene Palace (1942)
Sudipto Sanyal – Online, Techno India University
Grand Guignol Hotels and the Supermodernity of Noir
Somnath Basu – Online, Ramananda College
Innconveniences: Hotels and Crime in the Works of Agatha Christie
Nikos Filippaios, University of Ioannina
“The Most Original Hotel of the World”: Memory, Crime and Tourism in Giannis Maris’ The Hands of Aphrodite (1963)
11:45– 13:00 Hotel Rooms and Forms
Chair: Anne-Reynes-Delobel, Aix-Marseille University
Josie Cray – Online, Cardiff University
“This room growing around me like a poisoned web”: Submerged in the hotel bedrooms of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest
Christina Mirza – Online, St. Xavier’s College
A Room with a View: Vision and Experiment in the Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Hope Mirrlees
Sonakshi Srivastava – Online, Indraprastha University
A Room for (N)one: An Enquiry into the Aesthetics of Hotel in Chowringhee
13:00 – 14:30 Break
14:30-15:45 Interwar Hotels and Urban Mobilities
Chair: Rajesh Heynickx, KU Leuven
Ulrike Zitzlsperger, University of Exeter
Life and Work in Interwar “Cathedrals of Modernity”
Chryssa Marinou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Joseph Roth’s Hotels in the 1920s: The Displaced Male Subject after WWI
Anne Reynes-Delobel, Aix-Marseille University
Heterogeneous Spaces in Provisional Relations: Hotel Life and Transnational Magazines in the 1920s
15:45-16:15 Coffee break
16:15-17:30 Ephemeral Hotels
Chair: Bettina Matthias, Middlebury College
Emma Short – Online, Durham University
“[T]he hotel story he made up”: Hotel Life, Death, and Work in James Joyce’s Ulysses
Iro Filippaki, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Hotel Time and Impatience in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice
Tyler T. Schmidt – Online, Lehman College, City University New York
White Women & Cheap Hotels
17:45-18:45 Keynote
Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow
Hotel Trouble
Chair: Efterpi Mitsi, National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens
18:45 Closing reception