On Wednesday, February 19 at 5:30pm in Pearn Auditorum (BRN 228), Dr. John Fletcher will kick off the Spring 2020 Humanities Forum with his talk “Real Trouble: Performing Irony and Identity in a Deepfake World.”

Deepfakes have become a part of our contemporary lives. These algorithmically-generated manipulations of images and videos have been profiled by Reset, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and recently in The Atlantic as ways that disinformation and misinformation proliferates online.

John Fletcher is the Billy J. Harbin Associate Professor of Theatre at Louisiana State University. He studies social change performance, evangelical Christianity, and online disinformation/misinformation. His work appears in journals such as Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Theatre Survey, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Performance Matters as well as in anthologies such as Theatre, Performance, and Change (Palgrave 2018), Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (Palgrave 2017), and Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions (Michigan 2010). His monograph Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age was published in 2013 by Michigan. He serves as the co-editor of Theatre Topics. Current research projects involve investigating the endpoints of activist performance and theorizing irony/mendacity in online performance.

We hope you will join us for Dr. Fletcher’s talk.