Skip to main content
Decisions will be released on December 1, 2026. Currently showing all submitted seminars (excluding drafts).

18 seminars found

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

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...

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

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

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...