187 seminars found
Remnant Forms: Vulnerable Bodies and Interstitial Aesthetics in Brazilian Narrative and Art
Organizers: Nicole Sparling Barco, Raquel Parrine
Date Submitted: February 11, 2026
Vice Presidential Seminar: "After Political Knowledge"
Organizers: Hosam Aboul-Ela
In the introduction to his
Date Submitted: January 4, 2026
Imitations–of Life
Organizers: Jonathan Basile, Eric Reynolds
Life is nothing given, but what is negotiated in every text and every confrontation or conspiracy among those we call living. The scientific disciplines alleged to have mastered the secrets of life...
Date Submitted: August 26, 2025
Literary Ethnography
Organizers: Cheng-Chai Chiang
“Literary Ethnography” is an invitation to scholars who otherwise travel in a garden of forking ...
Keywords: Method, sociolinguistics, ethnography, world literature
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
Muslim Cultural Production in the Wake of the "War on Terror"
Organizers: Nasia Anam
Nearly twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is undeniable that the event’s geopolitical aftermath has permanently transformed the existing world order. Iterations of the gl...
Keywords: 9/11, War on Terror, Muslims in literature, Muslims in art, migration, practice of everyday life
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
Representing Aging: Literature, Film, and the Demographic Shift
Organizers: Stefano Rossoni
While I was working on this very description, a friend and colleague shared a BBC article reporting that Japan experienced its steepest annual population decline in 2024, with 908,574 more deaths t...
Keywords: Ageing, #literature, #Film, #Comparative approaches, #aesthetics
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
Oceans, or Aquatics, as Critical Method
Organizers: Neelofer Qadir
Oceans invite us to think together the material, metaphysical, and metaphoric. A cue from the continuous motion of the waters is, an oceanic critical method is an opportunity to engage their plural...
Keywords: Oceans, racial capitalism, colonialism, print culture, visual studies, Comparative literary studies
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
A[sian] I[ntelligence]: Asian-inflected issues pertaining to the imagination and implementation of generative AI
Organizers: Carlos Rojas, Eileen Chengyin Chow
From the distinctly Asian-themed futuristic setting of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner to the global shockwaves produced by Chinese company DeepSeek’s 2025 release of its powerf...
Keywords: AI, Asia, art, pedagogy, diaspora
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
Going Beyond the Literary III : Methods for Caribbean Interdisciplinarity
Organizers: Jeannine Murray-Román, Kavita Singh
This seminar explores how Caribbean methods of comparison – multi-modal, multi-lingual, and interdisciplinary – make common cause with other comparative fields. “Going Beyond the Literary I & I...
Keywords: Caribbean studies, #interdisciplinary humanities
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
Rot and Renewal: Theorizing Decomposition across Space and Time
Organizers: Christopher Walker, Jessica Croteau
How might we chart the generative possibilities of decomposition? Often indexing danger, disease, or disgust, decomposition has also emerged across multiple disciplines as a process that ...
Keywords: ecology, environmental humanities, environmental studies, STS, aesthetics
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
The Contemporary Intermedial Turn in Literary-Creative Practice
Organizers: Kaiyun Zheng
How does writing become reshaped when it converses with other media? What kinds of worlds can emerge at the porous interstices of words, images, and immersive space?This seminar invites scho...
Keywords: #intermediality, creative writing, Photopoetry, Experimental Literary Forms, historiography
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
Emergence of New World Order in the 19th and 20th Century: Mobility and Connections across the Asian Colonies through the Lens of Auto-Biographical Narratives and Travelogues
Organizers: Barnali Chanda
This proposal invites papers which investigate into ways in which written narratives emerging from the Asian colonies with special focus on India, China, Japan and South-East Asian countries in the...
Keywords: #travel literature, memoirs, Asian Literatures, archival theory, Asian autobiograp
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
Law and Literature: Rethinking the Interdiscipline
Organizers: Nimisha Sinha
This seminar reflects on the relationship between law and literature, particularly on how literary forms and narratives interact with political and social legal orders. Julie Peters credi...
Keywords: law, critical legal studies, Human Rights and Literature, critical trauma studies, law and literature
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
On A (Not-So) Global Scale: Dissecting the Spatio-Temporal Complexities of Slow Violence
Organizers: Jordan Grunawalt, Asmita Saha
Rob Nixon describes, ‘slow violence’, as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space”, one “that ...
Keywords: methodology, space-time, environmental humanities, global cultural studies, embodiment
Date Submitted: August 9, 2025
Politics of Travel: Mobility, Neoliberal Capitalism, and the Production of Transcultural Knowledge
Organizers: Qian Feng
Travel is more than a physical movement across space; it is also a complex cultural and socio-political practice that allows people to cross cultural borders and meet challenges in different cultur...
Keywords: Travel Narrative, mobility, neoliberal capitalism, transcultural knowledge, diasporic identity
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
India, Poverty, and Western Eyes
Organizers: Priyadarshini Gupta, Muddasir Ramzan, Shruti Jain
While ancient Europe regarded India as a land of material wealth and proverbial wisdom, it also saw it as a land of man-like monkeys, banyan trees, and enormous elephants. Ancient Europeans perceiv...
Keywords: India, orientalism, poverty, colonial-capitalism, Postcolonial
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
The Uses of Literature in the Time of War
Organizers: Atefeh Akbari Shahmirzadi
Keywords: Persianate, Persian, literary pedagogy, Colonialism and Literary Resistance, #War
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Impudent Flesh: Thinking Bodies & Material Life
Organizers: David Bordelon, Britt Zeldenrust
“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossi...
Keywords: body, Body studies, Embodiment in literature, Embodied Practices, #materiality, Temporality
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Visible and Invisible Wounds: Trauma and Representation in Global South Diasporic Literature
Organizers: Abhik Banerjee
This seminar examines the representability—and limits of representation—of trauma in the literature of Global South diasporic communities. Loss of home, whether through voluntary or involuntary dis...
Keywords: Global South Diaspora, trauma theory, postcolonial studies, Migrant Literature, Post-psychoanalytic Thought, memory, hybridity
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Realism and Its Discontents
Organizers: Ariel Pickett, Ronny Litvack-Katzman
Realism has traditionally, albeit variously, been conceived through explicit attention to detail, the representation of individual experience, or the attempt to depict ‘objective’ reality...
Keywords: realism, Spirituality, re-enchantment, literary theory, genre theory
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean
Organizers: XU PENG, Peiyu Yang
Keywords: asian american studies, Asia-Pacific, migration, Asian diaspora, Caribbean, relationality
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Archiving Socialisms: Material and Intellectual Legacies
Organizers: María Isabel Alfonso
Socialism has left traces — some concrete and obdurate, others spectral and elusive. These endure not only in architecture and infrastructure, but also in affective communities, and collective imag...
Keywords: archives, Spectrality, socialism, post-socialism, socialist legacies, Cuba, Socialist Bloc, Eastern Bloc, China
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Particularity, Nonnarrative, and Global Poetics: Critical Regions of Cultural Transmission
Organizers: Barrett Watten, Lauri Scheyer
This seminar will focus on recent, innovative poetic, hybrid, and nonnarrative literary works and other artistic forms in terms of their transmission across global regions. In so doing, it question...
Keywords: global, avant-garde, poetics, translation, cross-cultural
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Literary Criticism as Composition: Montage, Genre, and the Art of World-Making
Organizers: Thomas Symeonidis
Literary criticism is often treated as a secondary act, the intellectual afterimage of the work it addresses. This seminar proceeds from the opposite premise: criticism can be understood as a ...
Keywords: Literary Criticism, Comparative arts, Composition, montage, world-making, Genre
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Non-Human Archives: (Hi)stories and How We Tell Them
Organizers: Abigail Fields, Amber Bal
This seminar places renewed critical interest in “the archive” in dialogue with the “non-human turn” in ecocriticism. Work on the non-human and/or posthuman in literary and cultural studies (Harawa...
Keywords: non-human, archives, ecocriticism, posthuman, archive/counter-archive
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
The Cultural Labor of Internationalism: Reorienting Global South Solidarities in a Time of Struggles
Organizers: Yawen Li, Anup Grewal
As militarism, authoritarianism, and chauvinistic nationalism ascend globally, the need to imagine alternative forms of solidarity, including forms of grassroots internationalism, becomes ever more...
Keywords: South–South relations, cultural solidarity, aesthetics of resistance, grassroots movements
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
The Catastrophic Event in Times of Permanent Catastrophe
Organizers: Jonathon Catlin, Karyn Ball
From ancient tragedy to early modernity, the concept of catastrophe referred to the denouement of a drama; it was by definition unexpected: a turning point, a temporal rupture, even a revo...
Keywords: Catastrophe, Critical Theory, climate change, Eco-criticism, Benjamin, trauma theory
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Thinking Place
Organizers: Jennifer Wenzel
Thinking PlaceThis seminar focuses on questions of place in relation to process, method, and field-form for environmental humanities. What does it mean t...
Keywords: place, environmental humanities, climate change, narrative, new methodologies, collective practices
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Can Dialectics Make Bricks?
Organizers: Thomas Pringle, Mal Ahern
Theorists of media and culture have increasingly turned to two critics to better understand the relationship between humans and technology: Karl Marx and Gilbert Simondon. Both thinkers offer power...
Keywords: Marx, Simondon, media, technology, materialism, Labor, history, Comparative Media Studies, Comparative Technology Studies
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Anti-Authoritarian Aesthetics: Frontline Art and Performance in the Age of Autocracy
Organizers: Keren Zaiontz, Alessandra Santos
Our session invites seminar participants to engage in critical dialogue on how contemporary art and performance can be used to oppose the global surge of far-right movements and authoritarian ...
Keywords: #aesthetics, #antifascism, democracy, activism, art, performance, authoritarianism
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Translating beyond humans: translation as an ecological encounter between humans and non-humans
Organizers: Edith Adams, Hongyang Ji
Keywords: eco-translation, translation studies, nonhuman, Animal Communications, Indigenous studies, ecology, climate change, ecocriticism
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Thinking the Literature of Islands
Organizers: Brenda Machosky
This seminar focuses on literature (broadly conceived) and also theory-literature of islands, with a broad spectrum of what constitutes insularity. Any literature isolated by currents and distance ...
Keywords: islands, insularity, archipelago, prisons, sea
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
The Future is Past: Rethinking Dystopia in Contemporary Film and Literature
Organizers: Elif Sendur, Allison Mackey
In its canonical form, dystopia often depicts a dark future based on the worldbuilding of spaces and characters: these worldings operate as a warning, projecting a plausible future that serve...
Keywords: utopia and dystopia, speculative fiction, posthumanism, cinema, global literatures
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Prompting Comparison: Technological Horizons of Poetics Today
Organizers: Moira Weigel, Anne Dymek
Keywords: New Media, digital humanities, Critical AI Studies, Critical Theory, translation studies
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Shifting Selves: The Complexities of Identity in Displacement
Organizers: Rima Abdallah
Ghassan Kanafani said in his book Return to Haifa, “I have lost my identity in exile, and my memories have become my homeland. I live in an endless longing,” while Youssef Idris said in hi...
Keywords: #Search for Identity and Belonging
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Climate Fictions Before Climate Change
Organizers: Patrick Durdel
This seminar seeks to explore what we can learn about climate fiction and about literature’s role in understanding and addressing climate change when we look at literary texts written before climat...
Keywords: climate, climate change, climate fiction, Genre, environment, environmental humanities
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Stigma: Writing Abjection, Reimagining Power
Organizers: Sally Hansen
The word “stigma” literally means a “mark” or “brand” of disgrace. In its early Greek usage, a stigma described a cut or burn inscribed on the skin to mark enslavement, criminality, or de...
Keywords: stigma, inscription, poetics, black studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, #mysticism
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
The Beauty of Killing Fascism
Organizers: Lupina Farhana
We invite contributions that address the liminal space of theatre as a place for interrupting Fascism. Leading up to Fascism’s stronghold, Europe witnessed the resto...
Keywords: #fascism, #antifascism, theatre, #WalterBenjamin, #aesthetics, #politics, authoritarianism
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Anti-Socially Necessary Labour Time
Organizers: Rob Jackson, Anisha Sankar
Capitalism’s drive for surplus value is contingent on a set of class relations that get flattened out to produce the category of abstract labour and its index, “socially necessary labour ...
Keywords: Social form, representation, abstract labour, value, race, land
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
After Autofiction
Organizers: Esme Feurtado, Grace Brimacombe-Rand
“Autofiction was fun,” laments Lauren Oyler, in a 2018 review for the Baffler, “while it lasted, but a self-conscious movement based on the lives and reading lists of young ...
Keywords: contemporary, contemporary novel, autofiction, race, #form, Genre, Metafiction
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
The Weird Beyond Weird Fiction: Weirding as Critical Heuristic
Organizers: Robert Baskin
This seminar seeks to explore the expanding definition of the Weird and the critical act of "Weirding" texts beyond the traditional confines of cosmic horror. The Weird emerged in its cur...
Keywords: Weird fiction, genre studies, #aesthetics, 20th and 21st centuries, literary theory
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Reading for Pleasure
Organizers: Adeline Soldin, Amaury Leopoldo Sosa
In Le Plaisir du texte, Barthes reflects on myriad forms of textual and readerly pleasure: from finding Proust in Stendhal (intertextuality) to reading the same text with a different rhyth...
Keywords: pleasure, pleasure of the text, reading, reading and textuality, Roland Barthes, postcritique
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Romanticism and Media (Theory)
Organizers: Jeremy Arnott, Rowan Melling
Romanticism and media theory have a recursive relationship. In this panel we invite contributions which explore Romantic thought in constellation with media theory and critical theories of technolo...
Keywords: Romanticism, digital media, German, English Literatures, communication
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Water as Teacher: Pedagogical Practices of Liberation
Organizers: Kate Stanley, Tanner Layton
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s multimodal work as a Nishnaabeg theorist (e.g., As We’ve Always Done), musician (e.g., Theory of Ice), storyteller (e.g., Islands of Decolonial L...
Keywords: Leanne Simpson, decolonization, humanities education, activism, Indigenous resurgence, land-based pedagogy, water
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Performing the Self: Language, Persona, and Cultural Identity
Organizers: Dany Jacob
From the sharp-tongued salon epigrams of Oscar Wilde to the dazzling televised interviews of Billy Porter, public figures have long crafted language as part of a deliberate performance of self. Whe...
Keywords: performance and performativity, Self-fashioning, queer studies, Language and style, dandyism, speech acts
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Why Work? Compulsion, Coercion, and Narratives of Labor
Organizers: Thomas Adams, Jana Tschurenev
What compels us to work? Scholarship across the critical humanities has been strangely silent on this question. On the one hand, old proletarianization narratives have died hard, suggesting a gener...
Keywords: Labor, capitalism, inequality, carework, slavery, indenture, class
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Polemos: The Art of Theory
Organizers: Sorin Cucu, Dan Jacobson
“Fully constructed theories are complicated formations. In a sense they are works of art” (Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory 253). We deduce from this statement not only th...
Keywords: #theory, Artwork, polemics, polemos
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
No Longer in the "Waiting Room of Literary History”: Accounting for Nineteenth-Century Indian Fiction
Organizers: Jesse Cordes Selbin, Monika Bhagat-Kennedy
Keywords: Indian fiction, novel, Short story, English, vernacular, Colonial, victorian
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Modernism Otherwise: Global Modernisms Across Asia and Beyond
Organizers: Enver A. Akova, Luo Jia
As the globalization of modernist studies continues to generate new axes of comparison and fresh perspectives on the multiple temporalities of literary modernity, transnational histories of global ...
Keywords: modernism, global modernism, Global South, East Asian literatures, Middle Eastern literatures
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Ancestral Logics and Transcontinental Cacophony
Organizers: Ethan Madarieta
Who are our ancestors, how do they speak, and how can we hear them? In much of Western colonial logics and sociality the ancestors live in the realm of myth, coming to bear on our present through m...
Keywords: Ancestors, indigeneity, settler colonialism, colonialism and post-colonialism, critique, sovereignty
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Transgender Storytelling: Accounts of Oppositional Being and Becoming
Organizers: Clarke Crockett, Ezekiel Greenwood
What is the difference between being and becoming? Considering concepts like Jose Munoz’s queer futurity, we can determine that transgender history and the impact of this ever-present, gr...
Keywords: transgender, memoir, storytelling, LGBTQ+, queer studies, auto-theory, trans, queer
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Mythological Patterns, Themes and Narratives in Modern Literature and Cinema
Organizers: Lily Li, Kaby Wing-Sze Kung
The persistence of classical mythological patterns, themes, and narratives in modern and contemporary works of literature and cinema invites and even compels us to examine these works to determine ...
Keywords: mythology, literature, cinema, visual arts, 20th and 21st centuries, aesthetic, psychological and sociological implications im
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Palestinian American Literature and its Others
Organizers: Benjamin Schreier, Danielle Haque
Palestinian American literature emerges within the shifting terrain of Arab American studies, which coalesced in the 1970s–1980s through post–civil rights identity movements and Cold War/post–Cold ...
Keywords: Arab American Literature, critical ethnic studies, Critical Theory, institutional critique
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
One Poem: Reading Fast and Slow
Organizers: Nick Admussen, Lea Pao
In the digital age, headlines, tweets, posts, and updates have trained us to glance at short form text and quickly absorb its meaning. But lyric poetry demands that we slow down, read lin...
Keywords: poetry, lyric, hermeneutics, slow poetics, comparative poetics
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Textures of Time after 25 years: Histories of “history” in South Asia
Organizers: Julie Vig, Anne Murphy
The publication of Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black) twenty...
Keywords: South Asia, historiography, literary, premodern, decolonial
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
The Comparison of African Literature
Organizers: Duncan Yoon, Kirk Sides
The Comparison of African LiteratureRecent monographs such as Sarah Quesada’s, The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (2022) and Duncan Yoo...
Keywords: African, Postcolonial, Indigenous studies, world literature, Geohistories, diaspora
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Monocultures in Latin American Cultural Production
Organizers: Mathilda Shepard, Catalina Arango-Correa
Monocultures—of sugarcane, soy, cotton, eucalyptus, grass, oil palm, bananas, agave, and more—are a recurrent subject of contemporary Latin American social struggles and cultural produ...
Keywords: Plantations, monoculture, Latin American culture, environmental humanities
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Black Reconstruction Revisited
Organizers: Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz, Noah Hansen
90 years ago W.E.B. Du Bois published his radical revisionist account of the U.S. Reconstruction period, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Wh...
Keywords: history, US, W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, race, politics, class, Marxism, whiteness, Black radicalism
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Psychic Need
Organizers: sabine stxrm, AJ Baginski
The need to transition, the need to migrate, the need to code switch: what is the relationship between material and psychic need? How does the former map–or fail or refuse to map–onto the...
Keywords: psychoanalysis; transness; border; migration
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Life writing at the end of the world: evolving genres of the Self
Organizers: Terri Tomsky, Emily Johansen
The non-fiction narrative self has increasingly appeared in a variety of genres over the last fifty years — in autofiction, the autobiographical novel, in creative or speculative non-fict...
Keywords: autofiction, non-fiction, life writing, autobiographical novel, autotheory, hybrid genres, post-truth, New Media
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Performativity and the Performed: Voice, Ritual, and Representation in Arabic Literature and Culture
Organizers: Ali Alnahhabi
This seminar explores performativity and performance in Arabic literature and culture across historical periods, genres, and media. From classical poetry and maqāma prose to folk storytelling, urba...
Keywords: performativity, embodiment, orality, Folklore, gender, rituals, cultural memory, representations, Arabic-speaking world
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Bodies under Test
Organizers: Ana Ugarte Fernandez, Ana Maria Pozo
This seminar explores the intertwined logics, aesthetics, discourses, and phenomenologies of health, embodiment, and experimentation.It invites scholars to reflect on experimentation in its ...
Keywords: health humanities, disability, experimentation, embodiment, epistemologies of the South
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Black Matter(s): Opacity, Relation, Representation
Organizers: Pragati Sharma, Matthew Molinaro
In recent decades, Black Studies has witnessed important work on the ways in which the overrepresentation of ‘man’ and the invisibilization of whiteness have functioned in service of a ra...
Keywords: black studies, black feminism, #critical race studies, opacity, art and literature
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Cross-Border Indigenous Representation: tense and conflicting paths of "visibility”
Organizers: Roberto Viereck Salinas, Liz Ann Young, Grace Miller
As is well known, since the earliest days of contact between the European and indigenous worlds, the indigenous world has been at the end of the 15th century, the object of cultural interest that o...
Keywords: Latin American representation of the indigenous world, indigenous literature, Indigenous cinema, Latin American literature and cinema
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
W(h)ither Identity?: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Unselving
Organizers: Suchismito Khatua, Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang
In Poetics of Dislocation, Meena Alexander recalls her childhood migration as an experience of “unselving.” The ocean that makes her an immigrant also dissolves inherited id...
Keywords: identity, alterity, relationality, Feminist and Queer Theory, black studies, Asian American theory, Psychoanalysis.
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Theorizing the Nonfiction Distinction
Organizers: Dana Glaser
Nonfiction, as a literary critical category, has since the 1970s been increasingly discussed and persistently ignored at the same time. Pop literary histories have been given to saying that nonfict...
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Queering the Anthropocene: Radical Ecocritical Perspectives on the End of the World in Global Literature and Media
Organizers: Rebecca Ehrenwirth, Fareed Ben-Youssef
As environmental crises intensify, ecocriticism has emerged as a vital interdisciplinary lens for examining how literature and media represent, challenge, and reimagine human relationships with the...
Keywords: queer theory, ecocriticism, #media, #literature, film and media, Anthropocene
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Shared Imaginaries and Intellectual Entanglements Across Latin America/the Caribbean and the Middle East/North Africa
Organizers: Ali Noori, Elvira Blanco
This seminar invites proposals that explore the cultural, literary, and intellectual entanglements between Latin America/the Caribbean and the Middle East/North Africa from a comparative perspectiv...
Keywords: Latin America, Caribbean, MIddle East, North Africa
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Ecologies of Grief: Water, Memory and the Afterlives of Extraction
Organizers: Marta Sierra, Elizabeth Pettinaroli
Historical and political violence has increasingly been examined through the lens of memory and environmental degradation, where the material presence of rivers, lakes, and shorelines abo...
Keywords: Necro-spaces, environmental and climate justice, hydro-politics, environmental and historical trauma, rivers as archives.
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Close Reading and Comparative Literature: Histories, Debates, and New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century (A CLS Forum)
Organizers: Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Jonathan E. Abel
Conversations about the state of the field in literary studies have lately renewed attention to the question of close reading—as method, as pedagogical tool, and as a constitutive feature of the di...
Keywords: close reading, comparative literature, area studies, institutional and disciplinary histories, AI/LLMs
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Decoupled Ties, Weak Theory: Weaving a Literary History of the World
Organizers: Zhen Zhang, Wen Jin
World literature is a much-debated concept. Literary scholars have attempted to define the concept from the perspectives of circulation, literary values , literary capital , distant reading, transl...
Keywords: world literature, Weak Theory, literary history
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Uses and Abuses of History in Literary Narratives
Organizers: Ishan Mehandru, Nisarg Patel
To bend a phrase by Fredric Jameson, narrative is a historically symbolic act. Literary scholars and historians have long argued that not only are texts implicated in the time, place, pol...
Keywords: literary history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, Marxism
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
The Craft of Fiction
Organizers: Daniel Wright, Thom Dancer
This seminar seeks to reinvigorate the function of novel theory in our contemporary moment. Rather than seeking a “new” totalizing theory for this moment, we propose under...
Keywords: novel theory
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Others and Selves: Exofiction, Autofiction, and the Fictions of Truth
Organizers: Lilla Balint, Cornelia Ruhe
The seminar dedicates itself to texts from diverse linguistic and cultural traditions that have been described as “exofiction,” “autofiction” and related hybrid forms (such as autosociobiography an...
Keywords: autofiction, auto-theory, auto-ethnography, contemporary literature, exofiction, historical novel
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Contemporary East Asian Poetics: Technology, Ecology, and Intermedial Fluidity
Organizers: Liu Xiaoyu, Xuemeng Zhang, Shu, Hazel Chen, Huiwen SHI
Keywords: East Asian literatures
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Poetry and the State in the 1960s
Organizers: Stephen Ross
Poetry and the State in the 1960sThis seminar gathers new research on poetry and state power in the 1960s, with attention to two interlocking issues: 1) the postwar legacies...
Keywords: poetry, poetics, the cold war, state violence, the state, modernism, global modernism
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain and the Global Hispanophone World
Organizers: Aurélie Vialette, Akiko Tsuchiya
Our seminar addresses the question of how culture produced in Spain, from the 19th century to the present, reflects and shapes ways of understanding the history and heritage of a nation susta...
Keywords: Legacies of slavery, colonialism, Spain, global hispanophone
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
The Labor of Narrating
Organizers: Paola Iovene, Adhira Mangalagiri
How is the labor of narrating and interpreting the social world distributed in narrative? Who gets to narrate and interpret the world in which events unfold, and who serves instead as a provider of...
Keywords: narrative, Narration, division of labor, precarity, literary non-fiction, Voice, narrator, reproductive labor, realisms
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Global Crime Fiction and the Problem of (In)justice
Organizers: Andrew Pepper, Nicole Kenley
Crime fiction is intimately bound up with the claims of justice, even if the genre is typically critical of the state’s official justice system, to the point that ‘it affirms an alternative sense o...
Keywords: Crime fiction, justice, Genre, politics of genre, world literature
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Time and Temporalities: Literatures of imperial and anti-imperial politics
Organizers: Leisa Kauffmann, Peter Hitchcock
Keywords: decolonization, Postcolonial, Temporality, racial capitalism, anti-imperialism, end times
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Translation and Memory: Constructing Publics, Pasts, and Cultures
Organizers: Marlene Hansen Esplin, Youngmin Kim
When writing and interpreting for imagined audiences or publics across temporal, spatial, and linguistic divides, how do translators and interpreters reiterate or reconstruct imagined communities a...
Keywords: translation, memory, cultural heritage, language preservation, the sacred, ethnography, untranslatability
Date Submitted: August 8, 2025
Infrastructure Between World-Making and Nation-Building
Organizers: James Daniel Elam, Michael Allan
The ‘decolonial wave’ that swept over the Global South in the mid-twentieth century left newly independent nations beached on the shores of a dreary Cold War world. New nations required 'nation-bui...
Keywords: infrastructure, development, Global South, world literature, modernization
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Aftermaths of the 19th Century
Organizers: Emily Drumsta, Tristram Wolff
The nineteenth century saw the birth of many modern forms of knowledge production, increasingly sorted across the widening gulf between the human or social and the physical sciences (e.g. comp...
Keywords: 19th century, historiography, literary theory, anticolonial, translation studies
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Alphabets and AI
Organizers: Christopher Jimenez, Katia Schwerzmann
Keywords: digital humanities, Critical AI Studies, Comparative literary studies, global cultural studies
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Nonrelation, Comparison, and Dissensus
Organizers: Dima Ayoub, Na'ama Rokem
This seminar proposes a fundamental shift in how we conceptualize the work of comparison. Rather than privileging dialogue, bridging, or civilizational affinity as ideal ends of compariso...
Keywords: Arabic and other languages, Arabic Literature, Literary Translation, Palestine
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Translating, Publishing, and Teaching: Canadian Literature as World Literature
Organizers: Nefise Kahraman, Hande Gürses
This panel invites proposals that explore Canadian literature through the lens of world literature, attending to issues of multilingualism, diaspora, and the construction of literary canons. How ca...
Keywords: Canada, world literature, #translation, publishing, multilingualism, pedagogy, #CanLit
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Ways of Reading Racialized Ecologies 2
Organizers: Cheryl Lousley, Zishad Lak
Building on a stimulating seminar at ACLA 2024, and amidst dramatically shifting geopolitical contexts, this seminar will probe methods of reading that illuminate and disrupt escalating climate cha...
Keywords: #critical race studies, #ecocriticism, #politicaleconomy, climate change, Affect studies
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Marx’s Capital, Between System and Rhetoric
Organizers: Nathan Brown, Paul North
In the Afterword to the second German Edition of Capital, Marx divided his work on the project into two sides or phases: the search for the proper method and the search for the proper mode...
Keywords: Marx, Marxism, Capital, capitalism, translation, rhetoric, Philology, Conceptual Systems, historical materialism
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
The Manifesto and Postcolonial Thought
Organizers: Yogita Goyal, Peter Kalliney
In August 1857, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech on West India Emancipation, famously saying “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Two months later, as if ...
Keywords: postcolonial studies, anticolonialism, manifesto, literary form, Marxism
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Challenging "Nation" in World Literature
Organizers: Daniel Pratt, Yanli He
From Goethe’s Weltliteratur to contemporary debates on decoloniality and the global South, world literature has often relied—implicitly or explicitly—on the organizing principle of the nation-state...
Keywords: world literature, #nationalism, Internationalism, Cultural Nationalism
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Translationscapes of Southeast Asia: Rethinking Translation as Regional Method across Text, Voice, and Media
Organizers: Camellia Pham, Yen Vu
To designate a space as “Southeast Asia” (SEA) is to engage in a particular epistemology and toponym. Positioned as the marginal extension of both Indian and Chinese spheres—hence the colonial coin...
Keywords: critical translation studies, Literature in Translation, Southeast Asia, multilingualism
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Fictions of the Future in Palestine and SWANA: A Critical Reconsideration
Organizers: Shir Alon, Liron Mor
What role do fictions of the future play in the politics of Southwest Asia and North Africa? While recent scholarship tends to celebrate speculative fiction as an inherently subversive an...
Keywords: Futurities, future, SWANA, MIddle East, Palestine, speculation, spectacle
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Thought in Revolt
Organizers: Alex Dubilet, Oliver Silverman
NOTE: This seminar will pre-circulate its contributions. If you are interested in attending any of its sessions, please email the organizers to receive the relevant materials: alek...
Keywords: Revolt, Insurrection, Political Theology, Revolutions, Critical Theory, secularism, utopia
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Anti-Capitalist Critique and the Fetish
Organizers: Madeleine Reddon, Jonah Gray
This panel is interested in the close historical association between the discourse of fetishism in anti-capitalist critique, and representations of Indigenous peoples. William Pietz argue...
Keywords: indigeneity, Marxism, Indigenous studies, Anti-colonialism, Anthropology, commodities
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Out of Place: Forced Migration in Literature and Political Theory
Organizers: Florian Grosser, Nassima Sahraoui
According to estimates by the United Nations, over 120 million individuals are currently forcibly displaced worldwide. Warfare, regional disputes, state-sponsored violence, environmental disasters,...
Keywords: migration, forced migration, Exile, identity and belonging, Literature and Philosophy
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Versatile Bodies in Global Asia
Organizers: Yucong Hao, Yihui Sheng
Our seminar explores the potentialities of body as method in the study of Global Asian literature and culture. Engaging with interdisciplinary inquiries of literary studies, performance s...
Keywords: Global Asia, body, embodiment, theater and performance, Asian literature
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Alternative Imaginaries of Transport
Organizers: Arnaud REGNAULD
In July 2022, while megafires were devastating the the southwest coast of France, the mayor of one of the affected villages organized a boat gathering in front of the dunes where the pine trees wer...
Keywords: transportation, Bachelard, lowtechs, dreams, science-fiction
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Affective Narratives in Times of Environmental Collapses
Organizers: Pascal Schwaighofer, Kate Roy
The prospect of environmental disruptions confronts us with the legacy of previous generations, reluctant politics and aggressive lobbying of extractive industries, yet we are called to act responsibl...
Keywords: ecocriticism, Environmentail Humanities, politics of refusal, affects, optimism, hopefull pessimism, ecological grief
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Across Cultures, Across Species: Animals in Women’s Writing
Organizers: Haihong Yang
From Margaret Cavendish’s satirical “Animal Parliament” to Chi Zijian's novel Blue Sky above Clouds, women across cultures wrote with striking insight about non-human animals in all ...
Keywords: ecofeminism, women’s writing, early modern period, literary animal studies
Date Submitted: August 7, 2025
Re-Mapping Contemporary Extractivism
Organizers: Tianren Luo
Originally coined by Latin American decolonial thinkers, the term extractivism critiques unsustainable economic models rooted in dispossession, plunder, and the appropriation of ...
Keywords: extractivism, racial capitalism, infrastructure, world-system, #ecocriticism, decolonial
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
Infrastructure, Security, Sabotage
Organizers: Marc Kohlbry, Devin Daniels
As Paul Edwards notes, infrastructure “simultaneously shape and are shaped by…the condition of modernity,” even as the “large, panoptic systems” associated with modernity shift toward the “distribu...
Keywords: infrastructure, security, surveillance, control, sabotage, Neoliberal state, refusal
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
Contemporary Muslim Writers on Borders
Organizers: Emily Davis, Samina Gul Ali
In his pivotal, posthumously released scholarly text What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic (2015), Shahab Ahmed astutely notes that “In using the term ‘Islamic...
Keywords: critical muslim studies, borders, gender studies, decoloniality, displacement
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
Plasticity: Form, Matter, Method
Organizers: Lou Silhol-Macher, Annie Felix
Of late, the term plasticity has invited consideration in the humanities as a condition of materiality and a critical method.Catherine Malabou introduced the term to foreground the essential mallea...
Keywords: Plasticity, form, matter, aesthetics, Critical Theory, Critique and post-critique
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
Sensing Travel in the Hispanic World
Organizers: Cristina Carnemolla, Carlos Abreu Mendoza
Travel writing is a crucial site for the construction of cultural difference and the negotiation of power. This seminar seeks to move beyond traditional critical receptions by foregroundi...
Keywords: travel literature; history of the senses; perception; Hispanic literature; sensory experience; sensuality; North-South divide
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
Writing the Impossible in Eastern Europe: Biography and Autobiography Amid Trauma
Organizers: Eva Hudecova
Is it possible to write the self without also always narrating trauma? Is it actually possible to write the self at all? Writing a biography or even an autobiography or memoir has an implication of...
Keywords: Eastern Europe, memoir, trauma and memory studies, autobiography
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
The Role of Arabic in Comparative Literature
Organizers: Allison Kanner-Botan
Since the 1993 Bernheimer report, Comparative Literature as a field has officially taken a stance against its historic Eurocentrism. Likewise in 1993, María Rosa Menocal questioned the fo...
Keywords: Arabic Literature, eurocentrism, Mediterranean, MIddle East, premodern, Global South
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
Literary Nonfiction on Health and Medicine
Organizers: Mileta Roe
How do nonfiction accounts reflect, shape, and critique our understanding of threats to human health? This seminar invites papers that explore the intersection of health and medicine with the expre...
Keywords: health, medicine, nonfiction, narrative, media, healing, mental health, trauma, environment, relationality
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
Comedy Now
Organizers: Huw Marsh, Andrew Dean
In the introduction to their 2017 special issue of Critical Inquiry, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai describe the “commedifcation” of contemporary culture, noting that “it is ...
Keywords: comedy, humor, humour, theory, politics, form, Genre
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
Renegotiating Ethics in Literature and Film
Organizers: Chia-Chieh Mavis Tseng
In moments of rupture—whether personal, political, or planetary—narratives frequently stage ethical crises that challenge and destabilize established frameworks of responsibility, relationality, an...
Keywords: ethics, Contingency, literature, film studies, responsibility
Date Submitted: August 6, 2025
The Intractability of Dialectics
Organizers: Joel Auerbach, Thel Maude-Griffin
The dialectic has stubbornly refused to grow old. After being dismissed out of hand as an outdated and pernicious model of conceptual imperialism and a naïvely Eurocentric historical teleology, the...
Keywords: hegel, black studies, Blackness, antiblackness, relation, Critical Theory, aesthetics
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
Led in a Word I Got There: 21st-Century Women’s Experimental Poetics
Organizers: Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Jeannine M. Pitas
This panel invites proposals that explore the transnational field of experimental women’s poetry in the 21st century. We are especially interested in papers that explore the legacy of Alice Notley ...
Keywords: Experimental women’s poetries, transnational, Alice Notley, Feminism and Poetry, translation, multilingualism
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
(Dis)enchanting Modernity: Witchcraft, Magic, and the Occult in Global Literatures
Organizers: Kayla Penteliuk
In a 1918 speech at Munich University, sociologist Max Weber observed a widespread cultural loss of belief in magic and the supernatural: “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization ...
Keywords: witchcraft, #magic, #feministliterature, historical memory, fantasy, literary sociology
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
On Truth-Speaking, Flattery, Lying, and Bullshit
Organizers: Michael Krimper, John Ricco
In the last three years of his life (1982-84), Michel Foucault devoted himself to the question of truth and truth-speaking, focusing on the concept of parrēsia in ancient Gr...
Keywords: foucault, Critical Theory, fascism, neoliberalism, free speech, biopolitics
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
Poetry and the Choreography of the Body
Organizers: Elizabeth Fowler, Carmen Faye Mathes
This seminar warmly invites papers exploring the postures of the human figure as they appear in poetry. By posture, we mean the shapes bodies can take. Whether entwined, taking a knee, lying prone,...
Keywords: poetry, poetics, body, figure, posture, embodiment, ability, Spatiality, phenomenology, performance, orientation, standpoint
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
Marxism and the Lyric
Organizers: George Kovalenko
This seminar examines the lyric as a central and contested form in Marxist literary theory. Often viewed as the genre most resistant to historical materialist analysis—associated with interiority, ...
Keywords: #marxism, lyric, #poetry, comparative poetics, Critical Theory
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
Chronic Catastrophes and Precious Species
Organizers: Isabel Lane, Jennie Snow
How must we re-imagine justice for the more-than-human world in the face of planetary catastrophe? We begin with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s principle for abolitionist praxis, “where life is pr...
Keywords: abolition, environmental and climate justice, multispecies justice, carework, critical refugee studies
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
Critical Disaster Studies in Latin American and Caribbean Literature
Organizers: Danielle Dorvil, Sahai Couso Díaz
Our world is increasingly defined by the impact of disasters, but the specific terms of how we understand these events have varied over time and have often been framed by scientific, econ...
Keywords: Latin American literature, Disasters
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
Revolutionary Aesthetics: Art, History, and Political Imagination in 20th-Century and Contemporary Latin America
Organizers: John Hurtado Cadavid, Sebastian Hincapie
This seminar invites papers that explore the ways in which artistic practices across Latin America have engaged with revolutionary thought, historical memory, and political organizations that suppo...
Keywords: political imagination, revolutionary aesthetics, Decolonial practices, historical memory
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
After Adab: Loss and Linguistic Re-Imagination in the Postcolonial Present
Organizers: Noman Baig, Hamza Iqbal
In premodern times, linguistic multiplicity was integral to cosmopolitan life. The 13th-century Sufi poet Amir Khusro exemplified this ethos, as he seamlessly composed in Persian, Hindavi, Arabic, ...
Keywords: modernity vs tradition, nationalism, postcolonial studies
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
Global Cosmopolitanisms
Organizers: Joao Marcos Copertino, Alyssa Cottle
Since at least the nineteenth century, literature produced in what is today known as the Global South has been expected to be both cosmopolitan and nationalist at the same time. On the one hand, it...
Keywords: cosmopolitanism, theater, novel, Global South, opera and song, Latin America, Africa, Asia
Date Submitted: August 5, 2025
Environmental (In)Justice in African Literatures & Popular Culture
Organizers: Rebecca Saunders, Paul Ugor
This seminar seeks to examine how African literatures, film, arts, and cultural practices address instances of ongoing environmental degradation, anthropogenic violence, and the lived effects of en...
Keywords: Environmental justice, African Literatures, Resource Control, survival, Resilience, sustainability
Date Submitted: August 4, 2025
Decolonizing Comparative Methodologies Through Non-Canonical Imaginaries
Organizers: Tamar Barbakadze
The seminar proposes to re-conceptualize methods by placing decolonial approaches, non-canonical imaginaries and alternative epistemologies at the center of comparative analysis. It takes up three ...
Keywords: Decolonizing comparison, methods, imaginaries, archipelagic, metaphor, literature, indigenous, African, transnational, institutionalization, canonization, relationality
Date Submitted: August 4, 2025
Documents
Organizers: Scott Kushner
The document is a bureaucratic technology, one that offers “proof in support of a fact,” performs a “know-show function,” and holds “social power” as both a “representation of a fact” and an “inscr...
Keywords: documents, documentation, memory, paper, paperwork, bureaucracy, culture, society, ephemera, technology, media, history
Date Submitted: August 4, 2025
Atemporality
Organizers: Jason Gladstone, Michael Clune
Atemporality. The atemporal has been identified with aesthetic achievement by critics such as Cleanth Brooks, Murray Krieger, Michael Fried, and Anne-Lise François. At the same tim...
Keywords: atemporality, Temporality, temporalities, aesthetics
Date Submitted: August 4, 2025
World Socialist Temporalities
Organizers: Daniel Schwartz, Isabel Jacobs
This seminar invites participants to explore and compare conceptions of time — breaks, ruptures, leaps, decelerations, stagnations, and nostalgias — developed in socialist literature, film, archite...
Keywords: Soviet, Socialist Internationalism, film and literature, Temporality, historical memory
Date Submitted: August 4, 2025
Documenting Damage: Zones of Human and Environmental Violence
Organizers: Hannah Cole, Pierre-Elliot Caswell, Shabana Sayeed, Shahab Nadimi
Survivors of armed conflicts and environmental disasters alike experience an imperative to document the damages visited upon their communities through testimonial literature, visual cultu...
Keywords: environment, environmental humanities, Anthropocene
Date Submitted: August 4, 2025
Thinking Through/With Dance in Latin American and Iberian Cultural Studies
Organizers: Julian Gutierrez Albilla, Miguel Caballero
The medium of dance has been overlooked by Latin Americanists and Hispanists. Many scholars working in these fields have contributed to redefine the field of Hispanism as an “expanded field” (Kraus...
Keywords: dance, Embodied Practices, Movement, theory, Latin America, Spain
Date Submitted: August 4, 2025
Mobile Bodies: Globalization, Travel, and the Environment
Organizers: Priscilla Jolly, Krystale Tremblay-Moll
Our contemporary geological moment is shaped by the circulation of commodities, people, plants and even disease that can be traced back to 1492. In this historical context, th...
Keywords: #globalization, mobility, migration, environmental humanities, Literary geography
Date Submitted: August 4, 2025
Complaint, Queerness, and Killjoys: Engaging Sara Ahmed’s Theory
Organizers: Dîlan Canan Çakir, Alrik Daldrup
The release of Sara Ahmed’s twelfth book, No Is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining (2025), underscores her profound influence on contemporary i...
Keywords: #feminist studies, activism, queerness, epistemic violence, structural violence, killjoy, Emotions
Date Submitted: August 4, 2025
Cosmologies of Care: Relationality, Environmental Justice, and Cosmovisions
Organizers: Hsinya Huang, Chia-hua Lin
This seminar invites interdisciplinary and comparative engagements with cosmologies of care and relationality. Centering on “cosmovisions” which perceives the Planet as a living, rel...
Keywords: Cosmologies of care, relationality, Environmental justice, Environmentail Humanities, Cosmovisions
Date Submitted: August 3, 2025
Art in the Age of Fascist Production
Organizers: Duncan Faherty, Michelle Chihara
Across the last two decades, across the globe, far right social movements have come into the mainstream and pushed their candidates into pivotal political offices. As part of their shared...
Keywords: art and politics, #interdisciplinary humanities, #fascism, field future
Date Submitted: August 3, 2025
Rethinking Literature’s Persons
Organizers: Julie Orlemanski, Samuel Fallon
Character, person, speaker, voice: these English-language terms are at once ubiquitous elements of literary criticism and disputed ones. On the one hand, they ha...
Keywords: character, Voice, speaker, narrator, Personhood, figuration, personification
Date Submitted: August 3, 2025
Thinking the Aesthetic
Organizers: Robert Hughes, Charles Shepherdson
This seminar explores aesthetics as a challenge for thought that has been taken up in recent decades by continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism. Theories of the subject, theorie...
Keywords: FEMINIST THEORY, aesthetics, psychoanalytic theory, the body, affect theory, philosophy
Date Submitted: August 3, 2025
A New Existentialism
Organizers: Colin Jager, Yi-Ping Ong
This panel seeks to probe the contemporary “return” of existential themes and topics, both in the academy and in the wider culture. Concepts like freedom, agency, authenticity, comm...
Keywords: Existentialism, phenomenology, autofiction, Literature and Philosophy, Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Kierkegaard
Date Submitted: August 2, 2025
Korea, East Asia, and the Cold War Politics of Comparison
Organizers: HeeJin Lee, Chris Hanscom
This seminar proposes to examine how comparative literature and area studies have delimited possibilities for reading non-Western literatures by considering how Korean literature has been compared ...
Keywords: Korea, East Asia, anticolonial, decolonial, Postcolonial, cold war, comparison, Asian Studies, Non-Western literature
Date Submitted: August 1, 2025
Post-Millennial Speculative Fiction from the Global South
Organizers: Amit Baishya, Hanan Jasim Khammas
Speculative fiction—an umbrella term encompassing genres/modes such as science fiction, the weird, futuristic fiction, and fantasy—is increasingly being taken up by contemporary writers f...
Keywords: speculative fiction, Futurism, Postcolonial
Date Submitted: August 1, 2025
Miniature as Method
Organizers: Michelle Chow, Jane Zhang
In a world that constantly urges us to scale up—to dream bigger, to grow up, to grasp the “big picture”—what does it mean to think small? This seminar turns to the miniature, not merely a...
Keywords: miniature, scale, Affect, materiality, epistemology, spectatorship, memory, intimacy, visuality, transnationality
Date Submitted: August 1, 2025
The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities
Organizers: Dr. Mir Islam, Arunav Das
In recent decades, 'World Literature' has been revitalized, emerging as a field of critical exploration and debate, and has become an academic discipline and subject of contestation. In this contex...
Keywords: world literature, Global Anglophone, Comparative Literature and Area Studies, cultural studies
Date Submitted: August 1, 2025
World Cinema in Theory
Organizers: Sarah Hamblin
The idea of world cinema has always been slippery. First cohering as an umbrella term for films made outside Hollywood and western Europe, the concept significantly evolved in the early 2000s, as p...
Keywords: world cinema, film theory, transnationalism, globalization, international film
Date Submitted: August 1, 2025
Chronotopes of Extinction
Organizers: Timothy Bewes, Antoine Traisnel
Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the novelistic chronotope emerges from simple observation: that our experience of time is always spatial, and that the novel, as a representative and narrative form, is...
Keywords: pre-apocalyptic, space-time, climate change, #ecocriticism, Bakhtin, novel
Date Submitted: July 31, 2025
Literature and Solidarity in Times of War
Organizers: Anthony Alessandrini, Anna Bernard
In 1961, the leadership of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the newly formed military wing of the African National Congress, wrote, “The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: s...
Keywords: solidarity, militarism, Resistance, violence, war, poetics, manifesto, armed struggle, Palestine, genocide
Date Submitted: July 31, 2025
Reel/Repeat/Rupture: Digital Selves, Algorithms, and the Infrastructures of Online Community
Organizers: Manvendra Singh Thakur
Keywords: performance, repetition, rupture, algorithm, nostalgia, digital culture, self
Date Submitted: July 30, 2025
Literature and the End of Development
Organizers: Lauren Horst, Eleni Coundouriotis
In February 2025, the U.S. federal government announced that it was dismantling USAID, the agency created in 1961 to coordinate the country’s foreign assistance programs, including economic aid. Th...
Keywords: development, humanitarianism, Global South, postcolonial literature, literature and economics
Date Submitted: July 30, 2025
Atlantic Africa through Art, Letters, and Archives of the Francosphere
Organizers: A. Véronique Charles, Abigail E. Celis
This bilingual, French-English seminar mobilizes the conceptual expression “Atlantic Africa,” that has increasingly gained critical purchase among scholars as a means to foreground the cr...
Keywords: African Diaspora, African studies, Francophone literature, art history, Museums
Date Submitted: July 29, 2025
Space, Spatiality, Literature
Organizers: Ato Quayson
It has often been said that the end of the nineteenth century marked the rise of studies of space and spatiality over time and temporality. And yet one of the central problems we persistently encou...
Keywords: space, Spatiality, critical geography, urban studies, world literature Global South Studies
Date Submitted: July 29, 2025
Retheorizing the University: Toward a New Institutionalism
Organizers: Jack Chen, Maurits van Bever Donker
The university is a contradictory, or necessarily plural, institution. It is, and has been, a site of knowledge production, political critique, aesthetic education, class formation, racia...
Keywords: university, institutions, critique, power, form, humanities, liberal arts, democracy, global, authoritarianism, academic freedom
Date Submitted: July 29, 2025
The Knowledge of Art: Aesthetics and Epistemology
Organizers: Robert Lehman, Jess Keiser
Do artworks—architecture, painting, literature, and so on—provide a distinctive way of knowing the world? Does art shed light on human practices that philosophy or science do no...
Keywords: aesthetics, Literature and Philosophy, philosophy of art, epistemology, judgment
Date Submitted: July 28, 2025
Lyric Thinking
Organizers: Andrew Franta, Daniel Stout
This seminar (a sequel to a well-attended seminar at ACLA 2024) is interested in how lyric poetry has been conceptualized and practiced as a distinctive form of thinking. The inquiry it proposes in...
Keywords: lyric, lyric studies, cognitive literary studies, historical poetics, AI
Date Submitted: July 28, 2025
Free Indirect Style Across Languages
Organizers: Eve Houghton, Colton Valentine
Though the foundational work on free indirect style was done in non-English languages, today the critical discussion often centers on Anglophone scholarship. This seminar aims to redress ...
Keywords: free indirect style, narrative theory, narratology, #translation
Date Submitted: July 28, 2025
Paper Pushers and Ink Suckers: Objectifying the Administrative Subject in Bureaucratic Fiction
Organizers: Karolin Schäfer, Alexandra Irimia
The mundane objects of office life—typewriters, filing cabinets, rubber stamps, corridors—function as more than mere background in literary representations of bureaucracy. From the “ronds-de-cuir” ...
Keywords: office literature, bureaucracy, material culture, transnational aesthetics, comparative literature
Date Submitted: July 28, 2025
Queer Phenomenology at 20
Organizers: Victoria (Tia) Glista
In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed asks how we are oriented and how we come to find our way. Ahmed thus thinks across queer femi...
Keywords: theory, postcolonial feminism, #feminist studies, #queer, phenomenology, #sexuality
Date Submitted: July 27, 2025
Historicizing and Reframing Media Dispositives
Organizers: Dominique Jullien, Peter Bloom
The term dispositif has been widely adapted in relation to assemblage and system as part of aesthetic, political, and social theories of power. It has also been used to refer to devices an...
Keywords: dispositif, optical mediation, seeing/troping, topoi, intermediality, ritualistic figures
Date Submitted: July 26, 2025
The World in South Asian Literatures
Organizers: Zain Mian
This seminar will explore how geographies beyond South Asia shaped the production, reception, and circulation of its literatures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contrary to recent approaches that s...
Keywords: South Asia, Literary geography, world literature
Date Submitted: July 26, 2025
The Ljubljana School: Žižek, Dolar, Zupančič
Organizers: Russell Sbriglia, Frances Restuccia
This seminar will focus on the enormous contribution to psychoanalytic theory and philosophy made by Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, and Alenka Zupančič, who together comprise what has come to be known...
Keywords: Žižek, Dolar, Zupančič, psychoanalysis, Lacan, hegel, ideology, ethics, Political Theology
Date Submitted: July 26, 2025
Theorizing Translation in the Global South: Networks and Sites of World Literary Formations
Organizers: Razieh Araghi
This seminar proposes to look at the Global South as a series of interconnected sites for theorizing translation in relation to knowledge production, world literary circulation, and educational and...
Keywords: world literature, critical translation studies, cross-cultural circulation of texts, network formation
Date Submitted: July 25, 2025
Death, Dying, and Decolonisation: Legacies and Politics of Commemoration
Organizers: Kimmy Clough, Devaleena Kundu
Death Studies is a field of study that not only draws from a host of disciplines like anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychology but also cuts across fields such as bereavement studies, tr...
Keywords: decolonial studies, postcolonial studies, Commemoration, death, Global South
Date Submitted: July 25, 2025
Autofiction’s Deceptions: Jewish Self-Writing
Organizers: Ella Elbaz, Shiri Shapira
Paul De Man famously argues that an autobiography is a mask that distorts the face it covers; this seminar wishes to discuss the flip side of that coin: fiction that masquerades as autobiography—wh...
Keywords: autofiction, post-truth, autobiography, Jewish literature, narratology, unreliability
Date Submitted: July 25, 2025
Reconsidering the Ethics of Reading
Organizers: Monique Attrux, Ayse Irem Karabag
For many defenders of Western liberal education, literature has always been an indicator and instrument of civilization, a correctional officer of the “rest” as it were. In fact, Martha N...
Keywords: ethics of reading, nation, postcolonialism, liberalism, the reading market, institution, Critical Theory
Date Submitted: July 24, 2025
Doppelgänger, Mirror Worlds, Twins, and Doubles
Organizers: James Martell, James Martel
While the figure of the double or doppelgänger has fascinated literature since its diverse beginnings, Naomi Klein’s 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World sho...
Keywords: doppelganger, double, mirror world, twins, Naomi Klein, mirror stage, #mirror
Date Submitted: July 24, 2025
Love as Thinking, Thinking as Love
Organizers: Iana Seerung
In “Shattered Love,” Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “Love in its singularity, when it is grasped absolutely, is itself perhaps nothing but the indefinite abundance of all possible loves, and an abandonment...
Keywords: love, #theory
Date Submitted: July 24, 2025
Forest Stories
Organizers: Caren Irr, Richard Grusin
Like stories themselves, forests have little respect for geopolitical boundaries. And like forests, stories have always played a crucial role in human imaginations around the world. The wide distri...
Keywords: forest, trees, environment, environmental humanities, ecocriticism
Date Submitted: July 23, 2025
The Difference Accent Makes
Organizers: Pavitra Sundar, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
This seminar explores accent – a slippery and seductive concept with intersectional and interdisciplinary reach – as a mode of cultural production and interpretation.
Keywords: accent; accented thinking and criticism; voice; media; identity studies; sound studies; translation
Date Submitted: July 23, 2025
Reproducing Motherhood: Between the Poles of Natality and Maternity
Organizers: Zhuoran Deng, Rachel Shields
At a time when any strides that may have been made towards reproductive rights have been thrown into serious question, motherhood—its lived reality, its spectre, and its implications for ...
Keywords: queer theory, gender and sexuality, Critical Theory, reproductive rights, natality, motherhood
Date Submitted: July 23, 2025
Revolution as Kairos: From Classical Theory to Digital Temporalities
Organizers: Leihua Weng, Paul Allen Miller
This seminar invites participants to rethink the ancient Greek concept of kairos, the opportune or decisive moment, as a lens for understanding revolutions and radical events across the 20...
Keywords: revolution, Temporality, Greek, China
Date Submitted: July 22, 2025
Control, Communication, Cosmos: Systems Thinking and Practices in Asia and Beyond
Organizers: Zichuan Gan, Rodica-Livia Monnet
Systems are everywhere: as concepts, practices, and lifeways, they have sparked extensive theoretical debates and permeated creative work across multiple fields. Originating in the field of biology...
Keywords: system, Asia, cybernetics, information theory, science and technology, digital, institution
Date Submitted: July 21, 2025
Worlding of Sinophone Cinemas: Textures, Politics, and Aesthetics of the Everyday
Organizers: Jessica Tsui-yan Li, Chialan Sharon Wang
Seminar Overview:This seminar invites papers that examine how Sinophone cinemas contribute to global cinematic discourses through the lens of the everyday: ordinary peo...
Keywords: Sinophone, #Cinema, world cinema, the everyday, #politics, #aesthetics
Date Submitted: July 21, 2025
Unresolved Feeling, Fragments of Belonging: Emotion Across Text and Screen
Organizers: Bora Kang
This seminar investigates how repression, repetition, and unresolved rhythms shape emotional experience across Anglophone literature, heritage film, and contemporary media. It emphasizes stalled mo...
Keywords: affect theory, national identity, cultural memory, diaspora, film and media, Emotions
Date Submitted: July 21, 2025
Why Creative Translation Matters
Organizers: Brigitte Rath, Alexandra Lukes
A recent flurry of publications has put the spotlight on the role of creativity and experimentation in the practice of literary translation (Malmkjær, 2019; Lee, 2022; Robinson, 2022; Grass, 2023; ...
Keywords: experimental translation, critical translation studies, multilingualism, creative translation, AI
Date Submitted: July 21, 2025
Precarious Mediations: Queer Bodies in Virtual Spaces
Organizers: Elizabeth Richmond-Garza
Kleist’s queer marionettes (1810), Haraway’s anti-identitarian cyborgs (1985), and Murakami’s wind-up bird (1994) offer us instances of post-human glitches that resist normalizations despite their ...
Keywords: queer, virtual, BIPOC, precarity, post-human, 2SLGBTQI+, technology, embodiment
Date Submitted: July 20, 2025
Capitalist Realism's Worlds
Organizers: Darwin Tsen
Even though Mark Fisher's original thesis on Capitalist Realism was centered on the Global North - especially the United Kingdom - its global salience persists a decade and a half after t...
Keywords: #capitalism
Date Submitted: July 19, 2025
Murmur
Organizers: Thangam Ravindranathan, Églantine Colon
MurmurContrary to what Michel de Certeau, in May 1968, famously called the recapture of speech ("prise de la parole"), there is the unnerving sense today that speech, ever more prolifera...
Keywords: resist, dissent, power, deep listening
Date Submitted: July 18, 2025
Literary Translation and its Institutions
Organizers: Anna Muenchrath, Matthew Eatough
US literary studies has seen an increased interest in the actors and institutions that shape our literary markets and canons. Most recently, scholars like Richard Jean So (2020), Laura Mc...
Keywords: Literary Translation, cultural institutions, publishing
Date Submitted: July 18, 2025
Categorical Criticism
Organizers: Michael Dango, Dora Zhang
Accounts of aesthetic criticism typically foreground the practice of close reading, whether of individual novels, films, or memes. But an equally important skill is category formation, or...
Keywords: aesthetic education, judgment, Criticism, Genre, pattern recognition, aesthetic theory
Date Submitted: July 11, 2025
Situation, Situationism, Situationship
Organizers: Marcie Frank, Ned Schantz
“Situationship” almost made it as the OED’s word of the year in 2023. As the name for a relationship that falls short of full commitment, the term is both vague and specific in its designa...
Keywords: situation, situationism, Existentialism, social theory, activism, performance art, #intermediality, games
Date Submitted: July 10, 2025
Complex Relationalities, Encounters, and Solidarities in Settler Colonial Contexts
Organizers: Bruno Cornellier, Dallas Hunt
This seminar seeks to critically unpack the complex and often fraught relationalities of, but also the generative expressions and praxis of solidarities between, peoples – Indigenous, Black, and/or...
Keywords: relationality, indigeneity, settler colonialism, comparative race studies
Date Submitted: July 10, 2025
Racial Formlessness: Multiethnic Fiction after the Method Wars
Organizers: Henry Ivry, Timothy Lem-Smith
Over the past two decades, there has been an endless proliferation of critical methods and aesthetic forms tasked with the weight of mediating the contemporary. From the genre turn to dis...
Keywords: Multiethnic fiction; American literature
Date Submitted: July 9, 2025
Jameson, Allegory, and the Work of Art
Organizers: Oded Nir
Why does art exist? If the real is rational, as Hegel maintains, then we should be able to provide an objective account for the production of particular works of art in particular moments...
Date Submitted: July 9, 2025
On (Not) Hating the State
Organizers: Rebecca Oh
Humanists love to hate the state, perhaps now more than ever. Negativity toward the state is de rigueur in the humanities and Trump's version of the white supremacist fascist state in many ways man...
Keywords: the state, aesthetics, new methodologies, Alternate Histories, Literary Criticism
Date Submitted: July 9, 2025
Narrating Ethics Across Media: Storytelling, Moral Complexity, and the Shaping of Ethical Perception
Organizers: Francesca Medaglia
Is there a difference between traditional and new media when it comes to addressing moral and ethical issues? Specifically, how do different media forms influence storytelling, and how does storyte...
Keywords: ethics, narrative ethics, storytelling, transmedia storytelling, morality
Date Submitted: July 8, 2025
Reconsidering Selfhood in Fragmented Narratives
Organizers: Daniel Newman, Rachel Lebovic
Literary representations of fragmented or disjointed selves are often understood as reflections of broader social disintegration. The “solitary, asocial” modernist protagonist was, for Lukács, a pr...
Keywords: Narration, selfhood, identity, fragmentation, narrative
Date Submitted: July 6, 2025
The Long 1990s: Queer Theory in the Archive
Organizers: Heather Love, Robyn Wiegman
Over the past four decades, scholars have framed the origins of queer theory in contradictory ways. While many feminists in the 1990s understood it as a masculinist or elitist project that traded a...
Keywords: queer theory
Date Submitted: July 6, 2025
Intersectionality and Disability Studies in Contemporary Comics and Graphic Narrative
Organizers: Kai Qing Tan, Crystal Yin Lie
Since the 1990s, comics and graphic narratives have emerged as an emphatic media form for exploring the embodied experiences of disability and identity (e.g., Alaniz, Chute, Czerwiec, Dolmage, and ...
Keywords: Comics, graphic narrative, intersectionality, Disability Studies, contemporary
Date Submitted: July 5, 2025
CONSPIRACISM
Organizers: Sarah Brouillette, Lee Konstantinou
In “The Paranoid Style of American Politics” (1964), Richard Hofstadter argued that American political culture has been characterized by persistent conspiracy thinking, from anti-Masonic ...
Keywords: conspiracy theories, paranoia, suspicion, crisis, the state, capitalism, conservatism
Date Submitted: July 3, 2025
Rubble Poetics: Ecologies of Residual Trauma
Organizers: Gai Farchi
Keywords: Memoryscapes, trauma, ruins, literary witnessing, memory studies
Date Submitted: July 3, 2025
Eileen Chang as World literature
Organizers: Xiaolu Ma, Nicole Huang
Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-1995) was a major twentieth-century Chinese author who wrote canonical texts as well as a range of minor narratives in both Chinese and English. Chang’s ambition, f...
Keywords: Eileen Chang, world literature, transmedia, Transculturation, Sinophone Studies
Date Submitted: July 2, 2025
Legacies of Literary Heresies, sponsored by ICLA Research Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature
Organizers: Kitty Millet
Bruno Schulz's Cinnamon Shops, introduces a heretical Father, whose experiments in creation border on "regions of great heresy." His creatures populate an avian kingdom among the rafters o...
Keywords: heresy, transgression, sublime, liberation, imagination, religion and literature, Ethics of Representations
Date Submitted: July 1, 2025
Baldwin After BLM
Organizers: Kyle Proehl
If James Baldwin maintained a “ubiquity in the imagination of Black Lives Matter,” as William J. Maxwell and others have observed, then what are we to make of his words and image in a moment that C...
Keywords: #American Literature, #politics, aesthetics and politics, African American Literature
Date Submitted: July 1, 2025