On Joy
Video Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Morgan Hamill
Exhibition Number 504
Abstract
My project will ultimately produce a collection of loosely linked essays that might be suitable for publication by either a trade or academic press. I will approach subjects as various as joy, pain, illness, disability, adaptation studies, and the environment. Some of my central questions include: What does it mean to have pain—bodily pain, physical pain, emotional pain, spiritual pain—and what does pain have to do with joy? Is it possible for pain to be an incitement to joy, for joy to incite pain? These topics are bound together by my sense of the shared impulses between the practice of film adaptation and academic criticism, poetry and novels, essays and films—across genre and across time. Some models for my writing include Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, Zadie Smith’s Feel Free, Julietta Singh’s No Archive Will Restore You, and Anne Boyer’s The Undying.
Importance
With this collection, I hope to bring the work of creative nonfiction to bear on the work of academic scholarship, and in the process, I will work to expand the affective and tonal range of the English literature dissertation as a genre.