To Have and to Owe co-organizer Leigh Claire La Berge and theorist Annie McClanahan will share their respective work on cultural representations of debt--from how the language and metaphors of finance impact how we understand the social world around us to how photographics depictions of foreclosure show economies and aesthetics in tandem and in tension.

Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. She has written on politics in the university setting, Slavoj Žižek, the tv show The Wire and is currently completing the book Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Form in Contemporary American Literary Cultures.