2026 GCLR Graduate Student Conferece:
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Humor, Comedy, and Play in Times of Crisis
2026 GCLR Graduate Student Conference
with Keynote Speaker: Dr. Dorota Dutsch
Jan Matejko iconic painting features Stańczyk, jester of King Sigismund the Old of Poland's court, at a ball. He sits in despair as laughter occurs around him, having reading the news that Poland has lost Smolensk to the Grand Duchy of Moscow in war. Stańczyk's reflects on this loss, while the court continues their party.
The University of California, Santa Barbara’s Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR) invites the public to our annual graduate student conference,“Humor, Comedy, and Play in Times of Crisis.”
Humor, comedy, and play represents the ingrained performances of morality that shape both everyday and academic life as we balance socialized behavior with comedic instinct. The tensions of Academia—the barrage of critical symposiums on existential issues, the weight of global and local tragedies, and the looming threats to academic autonomy and funding—create daily moral dilemmas. These dilemmas point to the fundamental paradox of comedy and despair at the heart of humor studies. Our 2026 program invites our UCSB community to reflect on the humor in your work and lives, and asks you to join our scholars in discuss the stakes of laughing—or not laughing—in these times of crisis.
2026 Graduate Student Conference Program: “Humor, Comedy, and Play in Times of Crisis”
McCune Room 6020, Humanities and Social Sciences Building
Conference Open:
Panel 1: Feel free to laugh; Moral Comedy as a Tool of Oppression and Freedom
Panel 2: Feeling Blue; Humorous Approaches to Sexualities and Interiorities
Panel 3: Get serious; Deciding the Time for Work and the Time for Play
Panel 4: Outstanding UCSB Undergraduate Panel
Keynote Address:
Conference Close:
Dr. Dorota Dutsch, University of California Santa Barbara
We welcome our Keynote Speaker, Dr. Dorota Dutsch (UCSB) to speak on “Flat Laughter: Roman Comedy and the ‘Traumic’” at 3:15.
What does it mean to laugh in conditions that do not end? How do humor and play register the unstable relation between laughter and distress in ongoing crisis? This talk turns to Roman comedy to locate a mode that dwells within crisis rather than resolving it—redistributing pressure across roles, scenes, and bodies, and eliciting a laughter that clings to oppressive structures instead of undoing them. In Lauren Berlant's terms, this register is "traumic": comic and tragic become coextensive within a flattened present, where enslavement anchors a circulation of affect without catharsis—endurance without resolution.
Dorota Dutsch, Professor of Classics, has an MA from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland) and a PhD (2000) from McGill University (Canada). She has taught at the Jagiellonian University, Université de Montréal, and worked as an exchange scholar at the Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). Professor Dutsch’s research focuses on the interface of gender and knowledge in literary texts ranging from Greek philosophical prose to Roman comedy. Her most scholarship explores women’s contributions to global philosophical traditions---with ancient ideas about the gender of knowledge. Her forthcoming book, "Ancient Women Philosophers: A Very Short Introduction” follows her 2020 Pythagorean Women Philosophers: Between Belief and Suspicion. This conference also specifically appreciates her humorous approach to her research, exemplified in her 2015 article “Dog-Love-Dog: Kynogamia and the Cynics’ Sexual Ethics.”
Program to be announced after submissions are selected and organized into panels