Had the pleasure of moderating the “Storylines” panel on Day 1 (July 1^st, 2026) of the 24^th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities: Beyond Borders! The presentations and discussion were really thought-provoking, living up to its title by moving between fiction, comics, theater, and digital humanities to reflect on what "borders" even mean today.

Four speakers presented their research on this panel:

🌊 William Dickey (Juniata College) opened with a close reading of Jolene McIlwaine's Sidle Creek stories, showing how the collection dissolves the lines between human, animal, and environmental bodies.

🎙️ Santiago Rozo Sánchez (University of Kansas) took us into La Palizúa y Sin Mascar Palabra, documentary comics created with Colombian communities displaced by paramilitary violence, framing them as acoustic archives: comics that make audible what violence tried to silence, and that turn listening itself into an act of reparation.

🎭 Catherine Craft Fairchild (University of St. Thomas) examined how Lynn Nottage and Dominique Morisseau are reshaping African American theater, staging urban renewal, police brutality, and economic injustice in community theaters designed to be genuinely accessible to the people whose stories they tell.

📊 Sinem Çapar İleri (Giresun University) closed with a digital humanities approach, using Voyant Tools to map themes like revenge, power, and guilt across Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello, bringing computational methods to some of literature's oldest texts.

Very grateful to have moderated such a thoughtful conversation! #Humanities #Conference #Literature #DigitalHumanities

Day 1: "Storylines" Panel