157 seminars found
Post-Embodied Forms: Narrative, Body, and Performance in East Asia and Its Diasporas
Organizers: Chengbao Jin
In aespa’s recent WDA lore, the group’s artificial counterparts appear to displace or outlive the human idols, unsettling the distinction between the embodied performer and her reproducible image. ...
Date Submitted: August 2, 2026
Communication For a Safe World: Exploring Possibilities
Organizers: Amrit Mishra
The seminar is an attempt to look at multificated ways to understand communication. From workplace safety to global alliances, communication has a critical role to play. We invite submissions inter...
Keywords: human communication, protest, ethics, New Media
Date Submitted: August 2, 2026
Black Transfeminine Ecologies and Multispecies Gender in Golden's 'When They Come for Me'
Organizers: Silpa Joy
Human exceptionalism has long structured dominant understandings of gender by assuming that sexual difference, kinship and identity originate within the human and are merely reflected in the nonhum...
Keywords: Black Transfeminine Poetics, Ecological Gender, Queer Ecology
Date Submitted: August 2, 2026
The Metaphor That Poisons Itself: Amnesic Algae, Posthuman Care, and Toxic Heritage in Fei Yining’s Moonbays
Organizers: Xinyi Zhao
This paper examines Fei Yining's diptych Moonbays (2022–2023) as a site where the foundational metaphor of memory as a preservative archive undergoes a profound crisis and transmutatio...
Keywords: Metaphors of memory, Toxic heritage, Form-over-substance, Visual metaphor, Posthuman care
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Inhumanity: Law v. Literature
Organizers: Adam Schoene
Recent legal developments surrounding judicial scrutiny of institutional decision-making in higher education like the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals 2026 decision in Doe v. Rice University...
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
The Unbounded Body: Flesh, Organs, Prosthetics, and More
Organizers: Lijin Yang
In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz observes that Western thought has long been haunted by the threat of corporeal instability, framing the body’s fluid margins as a betrayal of rational s...
Keywords: embodiment, queer, crip, Disability Studies, posthumanism, Asian Body, body
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Peripheral Digital Humanities: Digital Methods and Cultural Production Beyond the Center
Organizers: Eliseo Jacob
Drawing on the Brazilian and Latin American tradition of periferia (periphery), including the literary and artistic movements associated with literatura periférica (peripheral lit...
Keywords: digital humanities, Peripheral Literatures and Cultures, Global Peripheries, Urban Cultural Production, Community Knowledge Systems, Minimal Computing, Decolonial Digital Methods
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Medium as Message: (Trans)forming National and Global Imaginaries in East Asia
Organizers: Chen Wang, Bozhou Men
Marshall McLuhan’s provocative dictum, “the medium is the message,” drew scholarly attention to the productive and even determinative functions of media in shaping social and epistemic realities. T...
Keywords: medium; mediation; East Asia; identity; memory; national imagery; transcultural
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Nation Within the World: Genealogies of a Comparative Method from the Global South
Organizers: Souradeep Roy, Abhaya N B
Buddhadev Bose, the Bengali poet, critic, and academic, set out to write his ideas behind introducing comparative literature in India. He posits comparative literature as a discipline of ...
Keywords: world literature Global South Studies, critical translation studies, performance, Postcolonial
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Anticolonial Environmentalisms: Matter, Method and Movement
Organizers: Sritama Chatterjee
This seminar approaches anticolonialism as an episteme that can be situated within the axes of matter foundational to anticolonial movement (such as soil and salt); as a method of politic...
Keywords: Environmental Humanities (992, environmental and climate justice, #postcolonial
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Mints and Prints: Money, Literature, and Revolution
Organizers: Academy Neta DAO
The intellectual contributions of the printing press to the rise of scientific rationality, the revival of interest in remote sources, and the emergence of secularism and civil society have been wi...
Keywords: revolution, money, political economy, credit, computation, digital culture
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Author in the Archive: Queer Writers’ Papers, Self-Writing, and the Ethics of Custody
Organizers: Valentina Pucci
What happens when a writer’s papers survive — or fail to survive — under institutional custody? The archive ceases to be mere context and intervenes in the author-function itself: it cura...
Keywords: queer archives; authorship; personal archives; self-writing; ethics of custody; affect theory; sexual dissidence; Latin American
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Loss of the World: Arendt's Modernization Thesis and Its Non-Western Horizons
Organizers: Yitian Zhai
Hannah Arendt's analysis of the transformation from the ancient Greek polity to modern societies offers an important examining perspective for understanding how modernization h...
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Blackness and the Promise of the Name
Organizers: Kyliel Thompson, Jaeden Johnson
For the critic Werner Hamacher, the structure of the promise is the pre-structure of language. It precedes language not only in its communicative structure but also in its predicative str...
Keywords: Blackness, naming, Promise, violence
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Beyond Reading? Literature, Affect, and Perception in the Post-Literate Era
Organizers: Adam Joseph Shellhorse
What if literature’s defining power has never been interpretation but intervention? Across comparative literature, Latin American studies, affect theory, media theory, and aesthetics, a growing bod...
Keywords: affect theory, continental philosophy, reading, Comparative literary studies, Latin American literature
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Reconsidering Performance in the Realm of Travel and Other Mobilities
Organizers: Rini Tarafder, Amrapali C.
This seminar examines performance as a multilayered concept that is continually reshaped through travel and other mobilities. Performance, in this context, can be understood in its broade...
Keywords: Travel, performance and performativity, mobilities, Cultural Encounters, tourism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
'Words and Clothes': Fashioning Stories in African Diasporic Literature
Organizers: Kimberly Lamm
Over the course of the last twenty years, a rich and wide-ranging dialogue about fashion, race, Blackness, colonialism, and decolonization has been taking place around the globe. Extending far beyo...
Keywords: fashion, African Diaspora, literature, Visual Culture, psychoanalysis; decolonialism, Marxism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
When Landscapes Haunt: Gothic Horror and Environmental Violence
Organizers: Zaynab Ali
From the snowbound Overlook Hotel in The Shining (King 1977) to the sentient unease of The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson 1959) and the racialized spaces of
Keywords: migration, #displacement, Colonial, afterlives, #Memory, #Film, #media, #horror
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Global China after the Sinophone: Comparatism, World Literature, and the Forms of Chinese Globality
Organizers: Xiaojiao Wang
A photograph shows a Chinese-built railway raised on stilts above Nairobi National Park, so the giraffes can pass beneath. A Nigerian novel appears in Chinese translation on a Beijing shelf. A film...
Keywords: Global China, Sinophone Studies, world literature, Global South, translation, comparatism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
From Game Derivative to Transmedia Co-creation: The Evolution of Sword and Fairy Novelizations in the Sinophone World
Organizers: JIAQI LI
Official game novels commissioned by developers are traditionally viewed as subordinate products designed to bolster game sales or extract additional profit from core players. While existing schola...
Keywords: Game novels; Derivative; Legend of Sword and Fairy; Transmedia Co-creation
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Media Revolution: Globalized Protest and Peace in the Global Sixties
Organizers: Peter Schweppe
This seminar interrogates the Global Sixties through the lens of a transnational media revolution. In the Global Sixties, the transmission of an idea reciprocated with tangible forms of circulation...
Keywords: Global Sixties, protest, activism, comparative media, anticolonialism, history, Design, aesthetics, print culture
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Enaction of Thought in Interactive Storytelling
Organizers: Justin Carpenter
Call for Participation: The Enaction of Thought in Interactive StorytellingIn literary fiction, the representation of consciousness has often been understood through what mi...
Keywords: Cognition; Interactive storytelling; narratology; aesthetics; intermedial storytelling; thought; embodiment
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Poetics of Enumeration
Organizers: Irene Bulla, Carlo Arrigoni
What role do lists play in literary texts? How and why do writers arrange names, objects, places, events, ideas, etc., in catalogues and inventories?Lists appear to impose order on multiplic...
Keywords: Enumeration, Lists, Catalogs, Accumulation, Description
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Entangled comparative literatures
Organizers: Christian Jil Benitez
This panel explores the possibility of recognizing the practice of comparative literature as a rehearsal of entanglements with the nonhuman world. While predominant understanding of comparison ofte...
Keywords: nonhuman, #Comparative approaches, posthuman, planetary thinking, environmental humanities, entanglement
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Infrastructure in the Wake of Fascism
Organizers: Peter Erickson, Ervin Malakaj
This seminar explores the persistent relationship between fascism and infrastructure. It draws on discourse in critical infrastructure studies as well as scholarship on the history of fas...
Keywords: infrastructure, media infrastructures, Architecture, transportation, fascism, aesthetics
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Sound and the Law
Organizers: Sabine Kim
"The warrant said, 'Narcotics and kidnapping'/ Are you kidding? I make my money rapping/ You crooked cops need to stop it/ There are no kidnapping victims in my suit pock...
Keywords: sound studies, law, power, colonial violence, sonic surveillance, AI, aural archives, Indigenous oral history, relational listening
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Transpacific Studies and Comparative Literature: Asia-Latin America and Beyond
Organizers: Blake Seana Locklin
Comparative Literature is always in a state of questioning its identity; the forthcoming Worlds of Comparative Literature: The ACLA State of the Discipline Report contains 448 pages on the...
Keywords: Asia, Latin America, Pacific, South-South, transpacific
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Romanticism and Artificial Intelligence
Organizers: Jeremy Arnott
Romanticism and artificial intelligence stand in a recursive relation: each supplies a vocabulary for theorizing the other. This panel takes up that reciprocity, reading Romantic thought ...
Keywords: #Romanticism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Literature and Resistance: An Attempt at Proximity
Organizers: Duygu Ergun, M. Sevgi Sen
We are witnessing a world increasingly shaped by political polarization, poverty, forced migration, mass atrocities, fear, social fragmentation, and ecological devastation. While class inequality a...
Keywords: Resistance, collectivity, reading publics, precarity, Urgency, community engagement
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Lost Spaces, Cognitive Dissonance and Hyperreality
Organizers: Shreyashi Mandal
Using comparative research methods in media studies to compare cultural and situational contexts, applying standard measures to compare data, and sampling them in units following a definitive condi...
Keywords: Research methods, #media, #globalization, auto-ethnography
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Terra Nullius Blues: Spiral Time, Robotic Cosmologies, and Globalgothic Catharsis in Brenda Peynado’s Time’s Agent
Organizers: Mariane Stanev
My proposal reads Brenda Peynado’s 2024 Time’s Agent as diasporic Latin American speculative cli-fi that reimagines colonial history, ecological crisis, and planetary
Keywords: Latin American literature, Otherness; Horror and Science Fiction(5882), young adult fiction; climate fiction; world literature; climate anxiety; futurity
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Decolonizing the Anthropocene: African Environmental Humanities, Literature, and Alternative Planetary Futures
Organizers: Dagnachew Gebrehiwot
AbstractThe Anthropocene has become a dominant framework for understanding planetary environmental change, yet its universalizing assumption that "humanity" bears equal responsibility for ...
Keywords: African Environmental Humanities Anthropocene Comparative Literature Decolonial Theory Ecocriticism Environmental Justice Africa
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Lingering in Dissensus: Comparison, Translation, and Constitutive Tension
Organizers: Dima Ayoub, Na'ama Rokem
Last year, our seminar Nonrelation, Comparison and Dissensus challenged one of the foundational assumptions of comparative literary study: that the task of comparison is to conne...
Keywords: collaborative translation, critical translation studies, Jacques Rancière, Palestine
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
What We Are Going to Become?: Dysphoria Mundi, Weird , Excess
Organizers: Elif Sendur
While describing our “dysphoric and revolutionary” present (16), Paul Preciado in Dysphoria Mundi creates a type of writing that is intentionally out of joint to embo...
Keywords: dysphoria, queer, animal, capitalism, mundi, Preciado, new weird, cinema, film, Television, media, SF
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Transnational imaginaries in/of documentary poetics
Organizers: Olan Munson, Michael Leong
The origins of North American documentary poetry are often traced back to Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” (1938). We know, however, that its practitioners (includin...
Keywords: documentary, documentary poetry, poetics, archival, transnational
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Comparative Ruins of/in Literature
Organizers: John Souza
Ruins are all the rage today. In a world where it is becoming increasingly apparent that the effects of climate change will be catastrophic, it is hard not to imagine all the fut...
Keywords: #interdisciplinary humanities, ruins, speculative fiction, climate change, #War
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Addiction, Then and Now
Organizers: Nicholas Allred, Maria Cichosz
Addiction is strongly associated with what Jacques Derrida termed “our narcotic modernity,” to the point of being synonymous with its ills––even, or especially, as both addiction and modernity flic...
Keywords: addiction, modernity, drugs, autonomy, medical humanities
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Contemporary Spanish Left and Its Discontents: Cultural Imaginaries of Class, Race, and Gender
Organizers: Jana Soler Libran, Miguel Ángel Blanco Martínez
The fifteenth anniversary of the paradigmatic 15-M movement invites a reassessment of its generational legacy. While the early 2010s challenged the neoliberal order inherited from the so-...
Keywords: cultural politics, art and politics, gender, Spain, race, Iberia, feminism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Carceral State: Prison Literature and Narratives of Confinement
Organizers: Arooj Zubair, Dana Jeblawi
In his short story, “The Man Who Is No Longer a Father” (1990), Ibrahim Samu’il outlines the tragedy of Nadhir Rahim al-‘Umar, a political fugitive in al-Assad’s Syria. He disguises himself to avoi...
Keywords: Incarceration, Prison Literature, Narratives of confinement, Witnessing, Carceral experience, Archive and the counter-archive
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Children’s Literary Expressions from the Past: Approaches and Perspectives on Children’s ‘Voices’
Organizers: Niyati Gangwar Sharma
This seminar invites reflections on whether children’s literary expressions from the past can serve as a means of tracing children’s ‘voices.’ It is situated at the intersection of two central deba...
Keywords: children's literature, children’s voices, children’s writing, Childhood, adulthood, #history
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Crises of Europe and Twenty-First-Century World Literature
Organizers: Ewa Wojno-Owczarska
Zygmunt Bauman analysed the crises of Europe through the lens of "liquid modernity," focusing on the separation of global power from local politics, the treatment of migration in the context of a ...
Keywords: The Crises of Europe. The Collapse of the Social State. The Rise of Right-Wing Populism. Migration. Global Crises.
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Methodological Decolonization: Rethinking the Production of Literary and Cultural Knowledge
Organizers: Tainã do Nascimento Rosa, Alcione Corrêa Alves
Over the past two decades, decolonial thought has become increasingly influential across Comparative Literature, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Translation Studies, and related field...
Keywords: Decolonial Methodologies, Knowledge Production, Literary and Cultural Studies.
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Waste as Method: Rethinking Literature, Medicine and Environment through South Asia
Organizers: Antara Chatterjee
Waste has become a productive critical category across environmental humanities, medical humanities and cultural studies. Yet it is still approached largely as an object to be managed, re...
Keywords: Disease, caste, Decolonial Translation, Literary Translation, climate fiction
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Narratives of Loneliness
Organizers: Busra Copuroglu
“Loneliness is one of the least satisfactorily conceptualized psychological phenomena,” wrote German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in a 1959 paper. This statement still holds true today....
Keywords: loneliness; literary theory; film; study of emotions
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Astarion Between Literature, Game, and Performance
Organizers: Holly Hoffmann
This seminar examines the transmedia evolution of Astarion, one of the central characters of Baldur's Gate 3, across digital, literary, and audio forms. Focusing on the forthcoming novel
Keywords: adaptation, video games, novel, vampire, audiobook
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Arts Against Angst: Creative Responses to Necropolitics in the Spanish-speaking World
Organizers: Fernando Valcheff-García
The end-times narrative has become ubiquitous in contemporary media and critical discourse in the Humanities. Ecological devastation, authoritarian politics, economic precarity, and socia...
Keywords: Arts ad Literature, Latin America, Latin American literature and cinema, necropolitics
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
(Re)composing Rot
Organizers: Kritika Sharma, Sonakshi Srivastava
To decompose is to live too, I know, I know… (Beckett, Molloy)This seminar invites papers, across interdisciplinary and comparative interventions, that ...
Keywords: decay, ruin, waste, debility, fragment
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Developing Reality: The Bildungsroman in the Context of Realism and Naturalism
Organizers: Geoffrey Baker, Tamane Harata
As a genre of becoming and formation, the Bildungsroman cannot escape its persistent interest in the representation of individual development within a changing social world. When Mikhail Bakhtin tu...
Keywords: bildungsroman, realism, novel, novel theory, coming-of-age
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Translating the Cold War
Organizers: Heejin Kim, Emre Keser
Today, the Cold War is theorized through the organizational structure of the nation state (political knowledge) and area studies (institutional knowledge). Yet, in this framework, the key role of l...
Keywords: cold war, critical translation studies, Postcolonial, multilingualism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Latin America, World Fascisms, and Reactionary Cultural Production
Organizers: Mathilda Shepard
The resurgence of far-right movements in North, Central and South America has precipitated an urgent need to understand the contemporary landscape and historical development of reactionary cultures...
Keywords: fascism, reactionary thought, right-wing culture, Latin America, Transatlantic Studies, Global South
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
A House of Her Own: Women, Migration, and Repairing a Home
Organizers: Cristina Perissinotto
This seminar examines the relationship among women’s mobility, domestic space, and property restoration. Nowadays these phenomena encompass literature, memoir, film, television, and digital culture...
Keywords: women’s mobility; restoration; domestic space; ethics of care; transnational narratives; travel writing
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Intimacy and Estrangement in the Moment
Organizers: Kelley Wagers
This seminar is an invitation to explore the forms, values, and dangers of intimacy and estrangement as political and aesthetic positions today. It is inspired by the sense that global events of th...
Keywords: intersubjectivity, public life, relational identities, political theory, experimental forms
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Affective Encounters, Alternative Modernities, and Travel Narratives between China and the World, 1842-1949
Organizers: Juanjuan Wu, Tomasz Ewertowski
This seminar (re)examines travel narratives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an affective archive of Sino-foreign encounters in the context of various concepts of modernity....
Keywords: Affect, Modernities, Travel Narrative, Cultural Encounters, China, Peripheral Regions
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Left Horizons: Liberation and Imagination Amidst Crisis
Organizers: Shakti Jaising, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam
The present moment has rightly been described in terms of crisis–economic, political, ecological, cultural. Marx saw crisis as built into the capitalist system; and a number of contempora...
Keywords: crisis, capitalism, critique, Left, liberation, grassroots movements
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Translating Kazakhstani Feminist Novels: Exploring Feminist Translation Influence on Narratives and Cultural Contexts
Organizers: Aina Niyazova
“...this is less a conversation about equality, — something we still have a long way to grow into— but more about a learned helplessness, when women no longer need men's active partic...
Keywords: #feministliterature, #culture, #translation
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Askesis Today
Organizers: Gabriel Trop, Josy Raheem
Contemporary life is saturated with exercises, even if we rarely name them as such. Practices of self-formation organize wide stretches of aesthetic, therapeutic, technical, and economic ...
Keywords: aesthetics, spiritual exercises, exercise, habit, cultural techniques
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Inheritors: Young Adult Fiction, Climate Dystopia, and the Politics of the Future
Organizers: Somak Mukherjee
A widely cited 2021 survey of ten thousand young people in ten countries found that most believed humanity was doomed and that governments had betrayed them. These emotions of grief, dread, and the...
Keywords: young adult fiction; climate fiction; world literature; climate anxiety; futurity
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Haunted Memory: Trauma and Spectrality Across the Globe
Organizers: Aimee Pozorski, Tiasa Bal
Since the publication of Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993) and the resulting growth of Spectrality studies in the past twenty years, much attention has been devoted to ...
Keywords: hauntology, spectrality studies, Trauma Studies, decolonial studies, ethnicity, memory
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Travelogues, Memoirs and Archives: Asian-Language Narratives of Asia in the 20th Century
Organizers: Barnali Chanda
This panel is meant to invite papers which examine memoirs, travelogues and archival documents written exclusively in various Asian languages about the Asian colonies including East and South-East ...
Keywords: Asian travelogues, memoirs, archives, classified, declassified documents, narratives, Alternative history
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Religion after Nation-State: Rethinking Minority in Comparative Perspective
Organizers: Thahir Jamal Kiliyamannil, Bivitha Easo
The comparative study of religion has long been shaped by Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment categories that consider “religion” as a bounded, privatized sphere, to be controlled and disciplined by, i...
Keywords: religion, minority, nation-state, Global South, community
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Positioning Racialized Communities: Asia and the West
Organizers: Miaowei Weng
This seminar examines how racialized communities are positioned within and across social, cultural, historical, and geopolitical formations. Positioning is understood as a relational and historical...
Keywords: Asia, #Western, racialized, positioning, migration
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Witnessing Pain: Contemporary Literature in a 'Post-Literary Culture'
Organizers: Grace Brimacombe-Rand
In July 2026, Rose Horowitch, a staff writer for The Atlantic, penned a take that many academics have feared in the last few years, that we are now in a ‘post-literate society’, where a fewer numbe...
Keywords: contemporary literature, trauma literature, hybrid genres
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Representing Victimhood: Ethics, Identity, and Collective Responsibility
Organizers: Estibalitz Ezkerra Vegas
Human-made violence (war and armed conflict, systemic and structural violence) leaves lasting marks on people, communities, and the natural world. The impacts and effects of human-made catastrophes...
Keywords: narrative ethics, victimhood, aesthetics of suffering
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Environmental Racism in African American Literature
Organizers: Shubhanku Kochar
Environmental racism predates its own name. The term entered public discourse in 1982, but the conditions behind it, namely exposure to hazard and unequal claim to safety, go back to slavery itself...
Keywords: Environmental Racism, African American Literature, racism, Environmental justice
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Resurrecting Ted Kotcheff: A Study of a Filmmaker Beyond Borders
Organizers: Asijit Datta, Nico Psaltidis
As a tribute to the recent passing of the prolific and excessively underrated Ted Kotcheff, this seminar will strive to offer a retracing and reevaluation of the director’s phenomenal career. It is...
Keywords: transnational cinema, state violence, film studies, HOLLYWOOD, adaptation, masculinity
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
AI, Race and Empire
Organizers: Muhammad Waqar Azeem
Lisa Nakamura in Digital Racial Formations and Networked Images of the Body (2007) traces the development of color-blindness with the rise of the Internet in 1990’s. Globally available Internet techno...
Keywords: AI, empire, Asian diaspora, human rights, race
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Healing Narratives, Embodied Histories: Medical Humanities in South Asia
Organizers: Bosudha Bandyopadhyay
Medical Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that examines the human dimensions of health, illness, and healthcare through the lens of literature, arts, humanities, and social sciences. It seek...
Keywords: medical humanities, health narratives, narrative medicine, South Asian Literature, Disability Studies, Gender and Health
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Modernism and Contested Territories in Literature
Organizers: Demet Karabulut Dede, Mark Byron
This seminar examines modernities shaped not by stability and consolidation, but by war, border change, and territorial contestation. While modernist studies has traditionally centered its inquiry ...
Keywords: modernism, Territory, contested regions
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
AI, Literary Writing, and Remediation: Rethinking Creativity, Form, and Authorship
Organizers: Xuezhao Li, Peizhen Wu
From Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator, one of the earliest computer programs for automatic literary writing, to today’s rapidly proliferating AI writing tools, such as NovelAI’s Xialong...
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, literary criticism, remediation, creativity, form, authorship
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Manufacturing Narratives through Ideological Mmanipulations in Hanif’s The Rebel Academy
Organizers: Dr Zia Ahmed
This study attempts to explore the process of narrative construction and the politics involved with this. The study draws upon the digital political discourse and manufactured narratives to study a...
Keywords: Surveillance and ideology, Manufactured Narratives, Narrative Construction, Contemporary Digital Culture, Digital Political Disc
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Affiliative Worldmaking: Queer Iranian Diaspora Across Media
Organizers: Sajad S. Yazdi, Marie Ostby
Gayatri Gopinath's foundational work on queer diaspora, which she theorizes as “global networks of affiliation constantly being produced and reproduced along the lines of race, ethnicity ...
Keywords: Queer diaspora, Iranian Studies, opacity, visibility, affectivities, homonationalism
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Recounting Trauma and Defeat in Medieval and Premodern Literary, Visual and Other Cultural Artifacts
Organizers: Montserrat Piera
Contrary to what we might think in modern times, Medieval and Premodern subjects were not immune to the violence and ravages of war and, despite the latter frequent occurrences, people from earlier...
Keywords: trauma, #medieval, #War, visual arts, melancholia, violence, #literatures
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
The Politics of Literary Recognition: Author-Making across Literary Words
Organizers: Apurva Ashok Prasad, Julia Pelosi-Thorpe
"I am not a woman writer." Toril Moi's well-known assertion captures a persistent tension at the heart of feminist literary criticism: if recovering women's writing has been central to fe...
Keywords: transnational literature, authorship, Censorship, feminism, Literary Translation, gender
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
¿Son gitanos?: Constructing the Romani Identity in the Hispanic World (1425-2025)
Organizers: Antonio M. Rueda
The year 1425 marked the official arrival of the first recorded group of Roma in the Iberian Peninsula. From the fifteenth century onward, beginning with chronicles, royal safe-conducts, legal docu...
Keywords: Romani Studies, Gitanos, Spanish literature, Spanish, medieval Iberia, early modern period, Hispanic Film
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Comparative Imperialisms
Organizers: Atefeh Akbari Shahmirzadi, Daniella Cádiz Bedini
There is nothing incidental about imperialism. In his foundational 1963 study of U.S. American expansionism, The New Empire, historian Walter LaFeber noted,First, the Un...
Keywords: imperialism, Comparative colonialisms, empire, world literature Global South Studies
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Queering the Settler Colony: Comparative Perspectives on Canadian and Australian Literature
Organizers: Lydia Efthymia Roupakia
The comparative study of Canadian and Australian literature has long demonstrated the value of reading these two settler-colonial traditions alongside one another. Building on the pioneering compar...
Keywords: Canadian Literture, Australian Literature, Queer Identities, Transnational and Diasporic Literatures
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Narrative Bordermaking: World Literature and the Remaking of Borders in the Global South
Organizers: Anmol Sahni, Swati Baruah
Postcolonial borders function less as fixed lines than as ideological and infrastructural apparatuses—visible, for instance, in contemporary border enforcement regimes and India’s northeastern bord...
Keywords: narrative bordermaking, postcolonial borders, Global South, oceanic imaginaries, decolonial & World literature, ecology
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Place Attachment in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures
Organizers: MARIA MEDIN-DOCE
According to Setha M. Low and Irwin Altman (1992), place attachment can be understood as “the bonding of people to places” (2). Much of the existing scholarship on this phenomenon has focused on th...
Keywords: Place attachment, displacement, Belonging, home, community, cultural studies, hispanic literatures
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Counter-Futures: Dystopia and the World-Building of Arab Fictions
Organizers: Patricia McManus
This seminar has the dual purpose of exploring the affordances of ‘dystopia’ as a sub-genre of science fiction for writing from the Arab world, and of testing the potency of the term ‘counter-futur...
Keywords: dystopia; science fiction; arab fiction; futurity; politics of the present
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Digital Memory and the Translation of World Literature
Organizers: Youngmin Kim, Paulo Horta
The ICLA Translation Committee seeks twenty-minute papers for a virtual ACLA panel on “Digital Memory and the Translation of World Literature,” exploring ways in which digital archives and data inf...
Keywords: Digital Memory, translation studies, world literature, Algorithmic Curation, Digital Archives, cultural heritage, Metadata
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Intergenerational Entanglements: Childhood, Youth and Aging in Generational Narratives
Organizers: Stefano Rossoni, Raahi Adhya
Intergenerational relations have long been theorized as sites of friction and continuity. Karl Mannheim (1952) argues that generations exist only in relation to one another, continually shaped thro...
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Colombian Cinema of National Reconstruction
Organizers: Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Martín Ruiz-Mendoza
How has Colombian cinema imagined collective life amid the aftermath and persistence of decades of armed conflict? This seminar proposes Cinema of National Reconstruction as a critical fra...
Keywords: national reconciliation, reconstruction, transnational cinema, post-conflict studies, visual cultures, Affect, Collective memory
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
A textual interpretation of cultural identity as a minority theme in the work Les Aubes brumeuses
Organizers: NABIL AALOUI
Identity and culture are two indicators that reveal the character's choices in the sub-Saharan African, Congolese novel Les Aubes brumeuses. The character of Marie-Ève represents an intell...
Keywords: readers, artistic creation, human communication, the imagination, the African novel.
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Bodies of Extraction: Labor, Gender, and Resistance in Fossil Capitalism
Organizers: Elena Fabietti, Anna Seidel
The extraction of mineral and fossil resources has historically been inseparable from the deployment of human bodies. Mines, quarries, oil fields, and other extractive environments do not merely ex...
Keywords: extractivism, #ecocriticism, body studies, #fossil capitalism, Gender and Technology
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Transautography: self-writing, autotheory, and surviving (in) the academy
Organizers: James Martell, Maddalena Cerrato
In this seminar, with “Transautography” we want to propose a new critical praxis for collaborative academic work in the humanities as a mode of existential resistance to the...
Keywords: autography, auto-theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, collaborative, Critical Theory
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Postcolonial Literatures and US Empire
Organizers: Katherine Hallemeier
Fifteen years ago, Neil Lazarus argued in The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011) that the “urgent” task of postcolonial studies in the 21st century is “to take central cognizance of the unrem...
Keywords: postcolonial literature, United States, empire
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Slavery, fetishization and robotics
Organizers: Anna-Lena Rehmer, Ann-Kathrin Albustin
In August 2025, the New York Post published an article titled “‘Pregnancy robots’ could give birth to human children in revolutionary breakthrough”. Many other international publications f...
Keywords: Feminist Science Fiction, Science Fiction, slavery, robotics, Unequal power relations, cyborg
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Surrealist Narratives
Organizers: Katherine McLoone
Over a century has passed since Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), and yet surrealism persists, albeit in various guises and a variety of media. This seminar will explore surre...
Keywords: surrealism, narratology, Genre
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Exploring Language Contact in Literature
Organizers: Eugenia Kelbert, Marianna Deganutti
Comparative literature has long struggled to overcome the biases of traditional models of national literatures, which fail to account for the fundamentally global, transnational and multi...
Keywords: language contact, multilingual, translation, hybrid, linguistics, framework
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Rethinking Authorship: Intercultural Genealogies of a Critical Concept in the Age of World Literature
Organizers: Giovanni Salvagnini Zanazzo, Federico Ristagno
This seminar aims to reconsider the critical concept of authorship from a strongly genealogical and transcultural perspective. While also focusing on world literature theories, considered as an eff...
Keywords: world literature, authorship, transculturalism, multiculturalism, creativity, subjectivity
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Chinese New Poetry Across Traditions: Classical Legacies and Transnational Dialogues
Organizers: Shuyu Guo, Ying Xiong
This seminar proposes a reexamination of Chinese New Poetry (xinshi 新诗) through its engagement with both classical Chinese literary traditions and global literary cultures. While xinsh...
Keywords: Chinese poetry, lyric, comparative poetics, #modernity
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Sonic mismatches in contemporary audiovisual media
Organizers: Arzu Karaduman
Since the advent of synchronized sound, cinema has treated sound as the guarantor of presence. Voices matched with lips; sound effects filled up space; music felt for the audiences, but most signif...
Keywords: contemporary media; audiovisual aesthetics; asynchrony; ethics; asonority; Derrida; deepfake; generative AI
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Rethinking Academic Freedom in and with Palestine
Organizers: Julie Orlemanski, Ahmed Kamal Junina
Palestine calls us to new practices and new theories of academic freedom. This call is a global one, but it echoes in varied, sometimes incommensurate ways. Academic freedom is often un...
Keywords: academic freedom, Palestine
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
On the Politics of Gender and Sexuality Studies: Futures of the Field
Organizers: Héctor García, Tia Glista
Prohibitions on the study of gender/sexuality are accelerating both globally and locally. For instance, in the American context of this year’s ACLA, new laws have criminalized gender affi...
Keywords: #sexuality, #sexualpolitics, Feminist and Queer Theory, #resistance, futurity
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Cultivating Future Intellectuals in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Education, Creativity, and Intellectual Confidence
Organizers: Bouchra Benlemlih, Mustapha Kharoua
As artificial intelligence increasingly generates texts, images, arguments, and interpretations, questions arise not only about technology but also about the future of intellectual life. What does ...
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Intellectual Confidence; Critical Thinking; Creativity; Humanities Education; Productive Struggle;
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Asia in the Caribbean
Organizers: Weibing NI, Mark Tumbridge
This seminar invites critical analyses of the representation of Asian-Caribbean subjectivity and cultural productions in the multi-ethnic, multicultural milieu. We encourage pap...
Keywords: #Asian diaspora literature, Caribbean Culture, Asian Caribbean, indenture, decolonial feminism
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Echo within the Walls of Stone: The Poetics and Politics of Madness in South Asian Fictional and Cinematic Narratives
Organizers: Sara Ali
The "madwoman" has long functioned in literary and cultural criticism as a catch-all diagnosis for emotions a patriarchal order refuses to name: rage, grief, desire, refusal. Since Gilber...
Keywords: Poetics of Madness; Female Rage & Grief; Feminist Protest; South Asian literature and film; Ugly feelings
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
Elsewheres of Black Freedom: National Exit, Natal Alienation, and the Problem of Home
Organizers: Laila Amine
This seminar invites papers on African American and other Black diasporic writing, cultural production, and thought that imagine departure from the nation as a response to racial injury, unbelongin...
Keywords: African American, African Diaspora, Black, Postcolonial mobilities. Exile, migration, return, fugitivity, refuge literature
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
Cosmological thinking and planetary speculation in Latin American Literature
Organizers: Lingchen Huang
This seminar convenes researchers working in Latin American literature, philosophy, and environmental humanities, broadly construed. It aims to demonstrate how literary work from Latin America cont...
Keywords: Latin American literature, Critical Theory, environmental humanities, STS, philosophy
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
Euromodernism’s ‘Chinese Eyes’: Orientalism and Formal Immediacy
Organizers: David Seamans
European modernism often imagined aesthetic form as a way to overcome mediation: to make alienated experience, fragmented sociality, or absent truth appear immediately whole or present. At the same...
Keywords: #Modernism, #Orientalism, #form, world literature, immediacy
Date Submitted: July 26, 2026
Comparative Legal Imaginaries
Organizers: Seon-Myung Yoo, Amanda Muniz Oliveira
As far-right movements gain political and cultural influence across the globe amid growing concentrations of power and mounting attacks on democratic institutions, law has emerged as a central mech...
Keywords: law and literature, jurisprudence, Postcolonial, gender, critical race studies
Date Submitted: July 26, 2026
The Transformative Process of Grief: Loss and Lament in Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive A Daughter’s Memoir and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped
Organizers: Payosmi Mishra
The grieving process, even though agonizing, can also serve as a catalyst for personal transformation. In recent years, the process of grieving has garnered critical attention in African American w...
Keywords: Grieving, African American, memoirs, Self-discovery, Transformation
Date Submitted: July 26, 2026
Relationality and Multilingualism
Organizers: Tamar Barbakadze
Édouard Glissant argues that no contemporary writer can truly write monolingually, since the presence of the world's other languages inevitably inhabits and shapes the literary imagination : « ...
Keywords: multilingualism, Decolonial Translation, opacity, creolization, Edouard Glissant
Date Submitted: July 26, 2026
Teaching Life Skills Through Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American Poetry
Organizers: Lisa Tucker
The anthology Tiny Flames: Voices from Ukraine (2024), is a collection of poems translated from Ukrainian to English. Three of the “budding” poets in this collection, Lilia Chernenko, Oleksii...
Keywords: Kairos, Rhetorical analysis, Ukranian poetry
Date Submitted: July 25, 2026
South Asian Futurisms: Imagination, Politics and Literature
Organizers: Maithri .
What futures can South Asia imagine for itself—and in whose languages, forms, and cosmologies are they written? This seminar takes up South Asian Futurisms, a concept that remains under-theorized w...
Keywords: South Asian Literature, decoloniality, Futurism, Futurities, speculative fiction
Date Submitted: July 25, 2026
Beyond National Allegory: Forms of Narrativity in the Global South
Organizers: Mohsen Maleki, Fatemeh Shams
The emergence of the modern nation-state and the contested and uneven path of modernization generated a crisis of representation, giving rise to an extraordinary range of forms of narrativity throu...
Keywords: Forms of Narrativity, postcolonial theories, nation-state, Global South, Fredric Jameson, national allegory
Date Submitted: July 24, 2026
Beyond the Periodic Table: Cultural, Scientific, and Ecological Elementalities in Global Context
Organizers: Meryem Deniz, Anna-Maria Senuysal
Facing global ecological crises driven by the extraction and exploitation of water, rare earths, and minerals, material ecocriticism has turned to “elemental thinking” to grasp the dynamic relation...
Keywords: ecology, elements, matter, elemental thinking, ecocriticism, materiality, agency
Date Submitted: July 24, 2026
Through Angelo Secchi: Divergence and Scientific Popularization in Emilia Pardo Bazán
Organizers: Valeria Tettamanti
Between 1876 and 1877, the journal Revista Compostelana published La ciencia amena, a series of eleven popular science articles by Emilia Pardo Bazán. Drawing on the works of Ange...
Keywords: science and literature, Spain, Italy, 19th century
Date Submitted: July 24, 2026
Diasporic Dialogues
Organizers: Alan Mendoza Sosa, Steven Beardsley
Twenty-first century U.S.-led neocolonial capitalism is structured as a global racialized hierarchy of political domination and international labor exploitation with roots in European col...
Keywords: diaspora, capitalism, cross-cultural production, dialogue, decolonial, queer studies, feminism, critical race, inter-diasporic
Date Submitted: July 24, 2026
The Fragment as Form: Embodiment, Memory, and the Politics of Representation
Organizers: LEILA PAZARGADI, Therí Pickens
Contemporary writers across diasporic, racialized, disabled, and transnational communities frequently turn away from traditionally coherent narratives of identity. Instead, they embrace f...
Keywords: Disability Studies, SWANA, black studies, fragmentation, life writing, Arab diaspora
Date Submitted: July 24, 2026
Translation and Restoration
Organizers: Giancarlo Tursi, Julia Katz
In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin introduces the famous image of multiple languages as shards of a broken vase, shards that he believes it is translation’s mission to glue ...
Keywords: Literary Translation, reparation, fragmentation, Reuse, art history, cinema
Date Submitted: July 24, 2026
(Un)intelligible worlds: Latin American imaginations and encryptions of changing architectures of technical intelligence
Organizers: Gwendolen Pare, Ana Forcinito
Current reconfigurations of artificial intelligence confront us, anew, with the intimate dependency between technology and humanity to render the world intelligible, to make worlds in com...
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Cosmotechnics, experimental writing, Latin America
Date Submitted: July 24, 2026
Ten Years after #MeToo: World Literature and Anti-Sexual Violence Movements
Organizers: Yuhan Huang, Miya Xie
The global anti-sexual violence movements of the past decade—#MeToo, #KuToo, #WithYou, #MiPrimerAcoso, #BalanceTonPorc—have renewed the relationship between literature and feminist activi...
Keywords: gender studies, reception studies, world literature, Feminist literature, #MeToo
Date Submitted: July 23, 2026
Greening the Red Planet: Ecocriticism and Socialist SF
Organizers: Virginia Conn
“In economic construction, like a child without experience, we declared war on the earth, unfamiliar with the strategy or tactics.”Mao Zedong on the Great Leap Forward
Keywords: socialism, Science Fiction, Chinese science fiction, Soviet SF, socialist ecologies, ecocriticism
Date Submitted: July 23, 2026
Rethinking Petro-Masculinity, Petro-Feminism, and Petro-Precarity: Comparative Literature in the Age of Fossil Modernity
Organizers: Daniel Brandlechner
Over the past decade, petro-masculinity has emerged as one of the central concepts for understanding the entanglement of fossil-fuel cultures, authoritarian politics, and climate denial. Yet the co...
Keywords: Petro-Masculinity, Petro-Feminism, Petro-Precarity, extractivism, energy humanities, petro
Date Submitted: July 23, 2026
Case Studies in Feeling: Toward New Theories of Emotion Across Media
Organizers: Haihong Yang
Emotions continue to attract critical attention across disciplines. Scholars have noted the growing prominence of emotion in media, politics, and internet culture, which some describe as an “emotio...
Keywords: Affective theories, emotion studies, cultural studies, literary theory, Game studies
Date Submitted: July 23, 2026
Beyond Choice: Motherhood, AI, and the Politics of Reproductive Futures
Organizers: Mousumi Biswal, Gokul S
Recent developments in artificial intelligence, assisted reproductive technologies (ART), fertility clinics, egg freezing, embryo selection, reproductive data infrastructures, and emerging artifici...
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, motherhood, Reproductive Futures, Posthuman Assemblage, Reproductive Agency
Date Submitted: July 22, 2026
Comparative Literature and Commodity Worlds of Mainland Southeast Asia
Organizers: Nanthanoot Udomlamun, Chi P. Pham
Mainland Southeast Asia — Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar — has long been made and remade by commodity regimes: teak and tin under colonial extraction; rice, rubber, and opium across shi...
Keywords: Mainland Southeast Asia, Commodity, Mekong Region, World-ecology, Decolonial ecocriticism, environmental humanities
Date Submitted: July 22, 2026
Genre Regenerative: 'Novel' Genre Forms in Historical Global Literatures
Organizers: Nathanael Booth, Kevin Wilson
Across global literary traditions, forms approximating what contemporary readers understand as something singular and unique, “the novel,” appear semi-independently throughout the modern and early ...
Keywords: novel, Global Novel, historical novel, Genre (1170, genre theory, Literary and Artistic Genres
Date Submitted: July 21, 2026
Nossa América / Nuestra América / Our America: Comparative Literature and the Disputed Name of a Continent
Organizers: Anderson Bastos Martins, Nícea Helena de Almeida Nogueira
When we say "America," whose America do we mean? In US English the word has narrowed to name a single nation, eclipsing the continent it once designated. This seminar takes that narrowing as its pr...
Keywords: hemispheric studies, decoloniality, multilingualism, indigenous literature, African American Literature, #archive
Date Submitted: July 20, 2026
New Directions in Venezuelan Literary Studies
Organizers: Elizabeth Barrios, Lorena Velasquez Briceño
Long overlooked within Latin American literary studies and the broader circuits of publishing and criticism, Venezuelan literature has gained new visibility in recent years. That visibility owes mu...
Keywords: migration, diaspora, Latin American literature, Venezuela, Venezuelan literature
Date Submitted: July 20, 2026
Formal Pleasure
Organizers: Urvi Vora, Eleanor Ivory Weber
There was a time when aestheticians would struggle to overlook the conservatism spread across Freud’s writings on the arts, when his denunciation of modernists and his narrow taste acted ...
Keywords: psychoanalysis, aesthetics, Lacan, Freud, Formalization
Date Submitted: July 19, 2026
Thinking with László Krasznahorkai
Organizers: Zina Giannopoulou, Ria Singh Thakur
In his Nobel Prize Lecture, the Hungarian author and 2025 literature prize awardee László Krasznahorkai announced that he would not speak of hope, but of angels. “Angels,” he said, “always carry a ...
Keywords: paranoia, Intertextuality, dystopian poetics, (post-)Soviet thought, apocalyptic worldmaking
Date Submitted: July 18, 2026
Post-Embodied Forms
Organizers: Song Huang
Post-Embodied FormsNarrative, Body, and Performance across East Asia and Its DiasporasIn aespa’s recent WDA lore, the group’s artificial counterparts...
Keywords: posthumanism, embodiment, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Performance
Date Submitted: July 18, 2026
(Re)Imagining Trans: Mappings, Crossings, and Tracings
Organizers: Simar Bhasin, Juie Gune
The seminar seeks to reinvigorate Trans Studies through the lens of a prefixial turn. In such an imagination, trans signifies a movement across, as well as a digression away from an unchosen starti...
Keywords: trans studies, migration, non-human, other-than-human, Trans-ing genre
Date Submitted: July 18, 2026
War Gothic: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives
Organizers: Lana Krys, Maryna Romanets
War has long occupied a central place in the Gothic imagination. Building on interdisciplinary conversation at the crossroads of Gothic studies, war studies, memory studies, and postcolonial studie...
Keywords: Eastern Europe, Gothic Studies, global war, postcolonial literature, memory studies
Date Submitted: July 15, 2026
Genocide and the Dialectics of Revolutionary Nature
Organizers: John Maerhofer
The current era of eco/neofascism and genocide demands an understanding of how ecological collapse, capitalist extraction, and systemic violence are systemically entwined. Following Engels, nature ...
Keywords: nature, revolution, genocide, ecological, Resistance, militancy
Date Submitted: July 14, 2026
Queer Anglophone Fiction, Sexuality, and the Ontologies of Nature and Nurture
Organizers: Ekikereobong Usoro
We propose a panel to examine the expression, subversion, and formal architectural framing of the nature/nurture debate within Anglophone queer fiction across various regions of the globe -- is sex...
Keywords: #global anglophone, queer fiction, nature/nurture binaries, queer ontology, gender and sexuality
Date Submitted: July 11, 2026
Monsters, Ghosts, and Other Terrors: Horror and the Gothic in Fiction and Film Across the Americas
Organizers: Patrick O'Connor, Dianna Niebylski
We propose a panel to examine the expression and reception of fear-inducing genres, including but not limited to the Gothic, in various regions of the Americas. We invite interested participants to...
Keywords: Latin American literature and cinema, gothic, horror, genre theory, Affect studies
Date Submitted: July 10, 2026
Beyond Representation: Rethinking Visibility Across Languages, Cultures, and Borders
Organizers: Sheena Yap Chan
Calls for greater representation often assume that becoming visible leads naturally to recognition, belonging, or authority. Literature and cultural production reveal a more complicated reality: vo...
Keywords: leadership
Date Submitted: July 10, 2026
Forming Optimism
Organizers: Ying Hu, Chunlin Men
The Chinese philosopher Zhao Tingyang describes our contemporary condition as a “bad world”—not irredeemably evil, but one in which the structural conditions for a good order of life have been unde...
Keywords: form, optimism, futurity, world-making, liberalism
Date Submitted: July 9, 2026
Graphic Medicine as Method: Visual Storytelling and New Directions in Medical/Health Humanities
Organizers: Kai Qing Tan, Crystal Yin Lie
Graphic medicine (GM) has increasingly become an important methodological resource in medical/health humanities (MHH), offering innovative ways to research, teach and communicate experien...
Keywords: Graphic Medicine, medical humanities, Disability Studies, intersectionality, Participatory Research
Date Submitted: July 8, 2026
Sensory Aesthetics Beyond the Five Senses Paradigm
Organizers: Hsuan Hsu, Erica Fretwell
The classical five senses—and, in many cases, a tendency to focus on single, putatively discrete senses—have played an outsized role in orienting sensorial approaches to literature and culture. Yet...
Keywords: sensory studies, cross-cultural sensoria, multisensorial, media
Date Submitted: July 8, 2026
Translating Local Literature: The Limits of Conveying Realia from ʻAbd al-Raḥman Munīf’s Mudun al-Milḥ to Peter Theroux's Cities of Salt
Organizers: Nouf Hawi
This paper examines the challenges of translating realia (elements of local reality deeply bound up with the universe of reference of the original culture) in the translation of Mudun al-Milḥ (Al-T...
Keywords: Literary Translation, comparative literature, realia, realism, cross-cultural circulation of texts
Date Submitted: July 4, 2026
The Chorus: Blackness, Visitation, and the Poetics of Enclosure
Organizers: Andrew Santana Kaplan, Joy Priest
This seminar takes its inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s citation of the Greek etymology of the word chorus: “to dance within an enclosure.” For Hartman, the chorus also fu...
Keywords: Blackness, black feminism, afropessimism, Black literary studies, Ancestors, performance
Date Submitted: July 4, 2026
What Is the World in World Literature Today?
Organizers: Simla Dogangun, Evren Akaltun Akan
More than twenty years after the publication of What Is World Literature? (2003), world literature remains one of the central paradigms of comparative literary studies. Questions of circul...
Keywords: world literature
Date Submitted: July 4, 2026
Gender-Sexuality and the Non/human
Organizers: Sreejata Paul
This seminar is interested in non-anthropocentric or even anti-anthropocentric understandings of gender-sexuality arrived at through transdisciplinary conversations between feminist theory, queer s...
Keywords: gender and sexuality, nonhuman, environmental humanities, ecofeminism, queer
Date Submitted: July 2, 2026
Literary Criticism as Theory of Mind
Organizers: Yael Segalovitz, R. John Williams
(rescheduled as Virtual Seminar)David Kurnick has argued that recent methodological debates in literary studies offer us “not new ways to interpret texts but… powerful images of what kind of...
Keywords: #theory, ethics of reading, subjectivity, theory of mind, institutional and disciplinary histories
Date Submitted: July 1, 2026
From Private Harm to Public Discourse: Representing Intimacy, Affect, and Everyday Violence in South Asian Pandemic Cinema
Organizers: Krupa Shah, Bibhuti Mary Kachhap
The scholarship on South Asian pandemic cinema that has emerged since 2020 has been disproportionately occupied with the migrant on the highway, the drone shot over the empty city and the mass crem...
Keywords: south asian cinema, everyday life, Slow Violence, intimacy, Affect
Date Submitted: June 29, 2026
Views from the Global South: New Horizons in World Literature
Organizers: Juan Meneses
In an exercise of comparative analysis that attends to a variety of literary, cultural, and geographical contexts, this seminar explores new disciplinary horizons that emerge from the friction betw...
Date Submitted: June 26, 2026
Narratives of the Unspoken: Embodied Memory and the Aesthetics of Distress in Comparative Trauma Studies
Organizers: Nafiseh Shajani
This panel explores the cultural, artistic, and transnational dimensions of trauma. We invite papers that examine how traumatic experience is encoded, recalled, and represented through embodied and...
Keywords: critical trauma studies, Disability Studies, #Memory, #identity, #Storytelling
Date Submitted: June 24, 2026
Based on a True Story: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Retelling What Really Happened
Organizers: Priscilla Charrat Nelson, Claire Rodan
What does it mean for a novel, film, play, television series, podcast, or work to be “based on a true story”? The phrase is at once familiar and unstable. It promises access to reality while announ...
Keywords: true crime, history, film and media, digital media, memory, cultural memory
Date Submitted: June 21, 2026
'Death by Water': Blue Humanities and the Gothic Imagination in an Age of Climate Crisis
Organizers: Shahrukh Khan
Over the past two decades, the environmental humanities have profoundly reshaped our understanding of oceans, rivers, and other aquatic environments. Simultaneously, Gothic studies have increasingl...
Keywords: blue humanities, Gothic Studies, climate change, Oceanic Gothic, Haunted Shores.
Date Submitted: June 20, 2026
Comparative Eco-Cinema
Organizers: Martin Premoli, Tomas Elliott
In an era marked by climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice, cinema has become a critical medium for imagining, narrating, and contesting ecological futures. This seminar inv...
Keywords: documentary, Anthropocene, film, Environmentail Humanities, environmental and climate justice
Date Submitted: June 20, 2026
Making Digital Literary Archives More Feminist
Organizers: Farinaz Basmechi
Digital archives have become increasingly important to literary scholarship, shaping how texts are preserved, accessed, studied, and remembered. Yet archives are never neutral. Decisions about what...
Keywords: Feminist Digital Humanities, Digital Literary Archives, comparative literature, Archival Justice
Date Submitted: June 19, 2026
Women Before, During, and After War: Gender, Violence, and Cultural Memory
Organizers: Wendy Adele-Marie, Ph.D.
How do literature, film, memoir, and visual culture represent women’s experiences of war, genocide, fascism, resistance, and their aftermaths? While scholarship has long focused on women as victims...
Keywords: Gender studies; war and conflict; cultural memory; genocide studies; trauma; film and media; comparative literature; resistance
Date Submitted: June 17, 2026
Whimsy and Whimsicality in the Academy and Beyond
Organizers: Mary Elisabeth Elliott
The terms “whimsy,” “whimsical,” and "whimsicality" have seen a rise in popularity in reference to both aesthetics and attitudes. The aim of this panel is to examine these terms from an inter...
Keywords: #literaryform, art and philosophy, #aesthetics, popular culture, whim, whimsy, whimsical, whimsicality
Date Submitted: June 17, 2026
Transoceanic Methodologies
Organizers: Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro, Victor Sierra Matute
In recent decades, transoceanic approaches have transformed the study of culture, literature, media, history, and the arts. Scholars working across the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean, Me...
Keywords: methods, transoceanic studies, transnationalism, maritime space, relationality
Date Submitted: June 17, 2026
Beyond the Pale: Queer Diasporas, Jewish Women’s Networks, and the Reimagining of Belonging in Elena Dykewomon’s 1997 Historical Novel
Organizers: Irina Rabinovich
This paper examines Elena Dykewomon’s 1997 historical novel Beyond the Pale as a feminist and queer reconfiguration of Jewish immigrant history from the Russian Pale of Settlement to early...
Keywords: Jewish American Literature, Queer diaspora, Lesbian studies, Migration and Memory, Feminist Historiography
Date Submitted: June 17, 2026
What Remains: Affect after Catharsis in Literature and Media
Organizers: Bora Kang
Affect theory has developed a rich vocabulary for feelings that fail to resolve. Lauren Berlant's account of impasse and exhausted attachment and Kathleen Stewart's sense of how affect gathers dens...
Keywords: affect theory, Diaspora and Transnationalism, Affect and Memory, film and media, #postcolonial
Date Submitted: June 16, 2026
Narrating with Machines: Creativity, Value, and Human Mediation in the Age of AI
Organizers: Francesca Medaglia, Daniel Raffini
What happens to the relationship between creators, audiences, and cultural industries when human beings increasingly act as curators, editors, and interpreters of machine-generated outputs rather t...
Keywords: AI, AI/LLMs, creativity, ethics, #authorship
Date Submitted: June 16, 2026
Narrative Futures and the Politics of World-Making
Organizers: DHANESH MANKULAM
Narratives occupy a central place in contemporary cultural and political life. From climate discourse and digital platforms to artificial intelligence, political misinformation, migration, and iden...
Keywords: Narrative World-Making, posthumanism, Media and Technology, Politics of Narrative, Comparative Storytelling Practices
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Music-Literature Interplay and Caribbean Poetics
Organizers: Charlie Hankin
The 2016 Nobel Prize awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” drew renewed attention to the literary dimensions of song. T...
Keywords: music, poetics, sound studies, Caribbean, Afro-Caribbean, performance studies
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
One Hundred Years of Magical Realism in Literature, Film, and A.I. Simulation
Organizers: Eugene Arva
This comparative-literature seminar proposes tracing the evolution of magical realism in the 21st century, formally, medially, and geographically. Besides the fundamental elements of magical realis...
Keywords: magical realism, critical trauma theory, ecocriticism, simulation, hyperreality, A.I.
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Poetics of the Literary Human
Organizers: Hayley Cotter
This seminar investigates how we know the literary human as distinct from the philosophical subject, the legal person, the theological soul, the political citizen, the biological organism, or the s...
Keywords: the human, poetics, subjectivity, form, representation, embodiment
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Götterdämmerung, Wyrd, and Apocalypse: From the Nibelungenlied to The Road
Organizers: Phil Waldner
This seminar proposes a comparative reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road through the lens of Germanic mythological ethics, arguing that McCarthy's post-apocalyptic world revives the moral...
Keywords: Wyrd, The Road, Apocalyptic Fiction, Götterdämmerung
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and AI
Organizers: Ari Ofengenden
The emergence of large language models and generative AI has revived fundamental questions that occupied structuralist and post-structuralist thought throughout the twentieth century. Long before a...
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026