34 seminars found
Thinking with László Krasznahorkai
Organizers: Zina Giannopoulou
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
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