Seminars

How to Do Theory with Examples

Organizer: Dylan Furcall

Is an example something one finds or something one makes? We often take for granted that writers passively find examples out in the world to provide a persuasive concreteness where theory feels... more

Disentanglements, retours, détours: (Dis)covering and Recovering the Transatlantic Expressive Arts Archive

Organizer: Marshall Smith

Middle Passage-descended expressive artists including writers, musicians, and visual and performing artists forge the rhizomatic moves and diasporic ambitions, fates, and tragedies of the actors (as... more

Theory without Object: Histories and Historical Accounts

Organizer: Daniel Carranza

For a term bandied about ubiquitously and with little conceptual caution, “theory” as a discursive category exhibits a remarkably torqued development in 20th-century Western thought. The contemporary... more

Structures of Change

Organizer: Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz

How is change structured? Or rather, under what terms can change be thought as structure at all? Does such a question require rethinking our conceptions of structure? Or of change? Catherine... more

Encounters: Textual, Digital, and Otherwise Mediated

Organizer: Jason Beckman

In this seminar, we are interested in exploring various complexities of the encounters that occur through media. Textual and visual media offer the possibility of encounter in many regards, as... more

Ways of Reading Racialized Ecologies

Organizer: Cheryl Lousley

Tania Aguila-Way and Zishad Lak, co-organizers This seminar is on methods of reading literary texts that illuminate the racialized dimensions of the environment and climate change. Ian Baucom... more

Relatability in the Novel

Organizer: Thom Dancer

This seminar explores the value of relatability in the novel. For many years, claims about the relatability or, more often, the unrelatability of characters, plots, and stories were understood to be... more

Uprootings: Autochthony, Race, and the Literature of Place

Organizer: Cynthia Quarrie

Metaphors of roots and rootedness, and their obverse — rootlessness, deracination, even “eradication”— are, as Christy Wampole puts it, “site[s] of extreme figuration," which suggests the extent to... more

(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm

Organizer: Erin Graff Zivin

How does rhythm (and its attendant art forms) allow us to produce philosophical or conceptual thought? What concepts (ethical, political, aesthetic, or otherwise) emerge from music, dance, sound,... more

Radical Medeas

Organizer: Zina Giannopoulou

Medea has captured the attention and imagination of artists and audiences in multiple media at least since the earliest extant literature of ancient Greece. She is at once a woman, a daughter, a wife... more

Is Gender Feminism a Conscientious Precaity or Immutable Contingency?

Organizer: Jayshree Singh

The book named 'Undressing Feminism: A Philosophical Expose' (2002) written by Ellen R. Klein has questioned women's vindication of rights in context of understanding the world of men and... more

Visualizations of Revolution: Historical Memory in the Filmic Form

Organizer: Rosa Martinez

In January 1896, the Lumière Brothers screened Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat to an eager Parisian audience. It’s been rumored for decades that those in attendance ran in fear of a life-sized train... more

Autistic Shit

Organizer: Sean Yeager

This seminar responds to Remi Yergeau’s question: “What might autistic shit signify? (16). We use capacious definitions for both “autism” and “shit.” The latter of these two terms is notoriously... more

Global Asias as Method

Organizer: Alya Ansari

Historically materialist procedures of reading have seemed remarkably preoccupied with the political, cultural, and economic rhythms of the Global North, and with the subjectivities produced by... more

Caste-ing Academia: The Global Rise of (Critical) Caste Studies

Organizer: Shruti Jain

North American academia in the last few decades has been forced to confront Caste as a crucial analytic in the study of the local and the global through various disciplinary perspectives. With... more

Theorizing Narrative Situation

Organizer: Marcie Frank

Here’s the situation in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery:” once a year, a New England town stones one of its residents to death. In Robinson Crusoe, it is that the eponymous protagonist gets marooned... more

AI and/as Form

Organizer: Sayan Bhattacharyya

How does aesthetic, material, and theoretic form relate to the current generative AI revolution? How should we critique the ideological and material consequences of the “textpocalypse” and the deeply... more

ACLA