66 seminars found
Formlessness at the End of the World
Organizers: mario telo, lynne huffer
Formlessness at the End of the WorldWhat is the relation between disaster and formlessness? How does a no longer postponable reckoning with ordinary ecocide and ongoing extinction alter the ...
Keywords: Formlessness; extinction; academic and creative practices
Date Submitted: July 18, 2026
A Pedagogy Seminar and raw notes
Organizers: Vivien Jiaqian Zhu
Synopsis of the trends: For the discipline of literature in East Asian Languages + Cultures there were a growing trend to incorporate active learning and digital humanities as pedagogy tools. This ...
Keywords: pedagogy, literary pedagogy, comparative pedagogy, land-based pedagogy, premodern
Date Submitted: July 17, 2026
Line, Please?
Organizers: Emily Drumsta, Samuel England
“The line-break enacts the rift between sense and language that language always tries to conceal, tries to heal,” Cole Swensen writes. This seminar lingers with Swensen’s rift by considering the fu...
Keywords: #poetry, Arabic poetry, comparative poetics, #translation, #popularculture
Date Submitted: July 16, 2026
Abortion Across Boundaries
Organizers: Jena DiMaggio, Samantha English
The overlap of the political and aesthetic languages of abortion in the United States often seems to be nearly total: American novels, films, television shows, and other media frequently ...
Keywords: Abortion, gender and sexuality, Pregnancy, Reproduction, reproductive rights
Date Submitted: July 15, 2026
Imagined Pilgrimage: Intertextual Narratives of Identity and Landscape
Organizers: Margaret Cotter-Lynch, Hailie Giles
Pilgrimage is teleological travel that ascribes theological significance to a landscape. Pilgrimage can also function as a narrative structure for the collation of literary imaginations of distant ...
Keywords: Pilgrimage, cross-cultural, indigenous, decolonial, ecocriticism, otherness, Intertextuality
Date Submitted: July 15, 2026
Intertextuality and Faith in 20th Century Literatures of the Global South
Organizers: Ken Seigneurie
Generally speaking, literary-philosophical and theological studies have formed separate university disciplines since the early-19th century. Partly as a result of this Enlightenment heritage, Compa...
Keywords: Intertextuality, Spirituality, cultural politics, world-making, secularism
Date Submitted: July 15, 2026
A Project of Epic Proportions: National Function and the Epic Genre
Organizers: Elizabeth Liendo, Jasmine An
The word “epic” originates from the Ancient Greek epos, which meant word, narrative, or poetry itself. One of the oldest documented genres in written history, epics often sh...
Keywords: epic, nationalism, premodern, origins, Belonging, adaptation
Date Submitted: July 14, 2026
Neurodivergences
Organizers: Laura Kanost
Neurodivergence, as a socially constructed category denoting neurocognitive nonnormativity, is “a way of being a person that comes from institutional practices of diagnosis and medicalisa...
Keywords: Disability Studies, queer, neurodiversity
Date Submitted: July 13, 2026
Nature's Freedom
Organizers: Simon Horn
The idea that nature might freely dispose of its elements was, for Immanuel Kant, possible only as a figment of human understanding – an analogy. In the same year as Kant’s third Critique,...
Keywords: ecocriticism, aesthetics, Romanticism, Philology, nature, Critical Theory
Date Submitted: July 13, 2026
Human Rights and Personhood in Literatures of the Global South
Organizers: Rojda Idil Arslan, Nimisha Sinha
As human rights institutions and legal frameworks are discredited, defunded, dismantled, and openly ignored across multiple national contexts, the question of what literature has to do with rights ...
Keywords: Human Rights and Literature, Personhood, Global South, postcolonial literature
Date Submitted: July 13, 2026
Postmemory & Rebel Childhood: A Comparative Look at the Literary Output of Sons and Daughters of dictatorial Argentina and Chile.
Organizers: José Negroni Cicerchia
As a PhD recipient from the University of Houston's Hispanic Studies Dept. (2023) I am eager to offer a seminar that will focus on theory and criticism in comparative literature and will feat...
Keywords: Chilean second-wave, autofiction, complicity, Pinochet, postdictatorial trauma, memories.
Date Submitted: July 12, 2026
Carceral Insularity Across Caribbean, Indian, and Pacific Archipelagoes
Organizers: Bassam Sidiki
Islands have a vexed relation to the carceral imaginary. Environmentally distinctive and geographically confined by water, islands have frequently been considered prime locations for harb...
Keywords: Incarceration, archipelagic studies, oceanic studies, abolition, tropicality, isolation, insularity, carcerality
Date Submitted: July 9, 2026
Aesthetics of Resistance: Revolutionary Imagination in World Literature, Film, and Visual Art
Organizers: Arunav Das, Farhin Faruque
Inspired by Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975), this seminar explores the connection between arts (literature, film, performance, and visual culture) and political act...
Keywords: revolutionary aesthetics, Resistance, social movements, Visual Culture, Art and Activism
Date Submitted: July 8, 2026
Translationality: History and Literature
Organizers: Linda Chu, Wen-chin Ouyang
This seminar explores translationality as a critical framework for understanding the dynamic interplay between history and literature. Moving beyond translation as a bounded linguistic act, we appr...
Keywords: translationality, translation studies, literary history, multilingualism, global circulation
Date Submitted: July 8, 2026
Can (the) “Algorithm” Speak?: Politics of “Authenticity”, Authorship, and Creative Precarity in AI-Generated Comics
Organizers: PARTHA BHATTACHARJEE
The growing presence of artificial intelligence in comics and graphic storytelling has been reshaping the conventional ideas on authorship, creativity, and artistic labour. This talk explores how A...
Keywords: Algorithm; Authorship; Authenticity; AI Tools; Graphic Narrative
Date Submitted: July 7, 2026
Worlding Classrooms: What Do We Teach When We Teach “the World”?
Organizers: Mazyar Mahan, Arya Rani
This seminar asks what it means to teach the “world” in fields such as world cinema, world literature, comparative literature, and global media studies. Courses organized around the world...
Keywords: world cinema, world literature, pedagogy, film and media, comparative pedagogy, film studies, classroom, methodology
Date Submitted: July 6, 2026
Feeding, Labor, and Precarity in Chinese Media Culture
Organizers: Hangping Xu, Ping Zhu
In an era marked by intensified technological mediation, ecological strain, and precarious care, acts of eating, feeding, sustaining, and reproducing life reveal their shadowed underbelly. Through an ...
Keywords: China, literature, film, New Media, Labor, care, food studies, Disability Studies
Date Submitted: July 6, 2026
When the Personal Was Geopolitical: Revisiting Cold War Literary Production
Organizers: Arthur Redding
How did the global ideological conflict between superpowers during the Cold War shape literary production? How was freedom or constraint imagined and rendered? This seminar invites new appraisals o...
Keywords: cold war
Date Submitted: July 6, 2026
Poétique de la fragmentation et de la résilience : La fabrique du féminin et les mémoires diasporiques chez Fatima Daas et Kim Thúy
Organizers: Hoai Anh TRAN
S'inscrivant dans les débats contemporains sur l'autofiction et les écritures de l'exil, cette communication propose une analyse comparative de deux voix majeures de la littérature francophone cont...
Keywords: autofiction, Traumatisme, Resilience, Fabrique du féminin, Mémoire, Littérature francophone, Kim Thúy, Fatima Daas
Date Submitted: July 2, 2026
Martin Luther King Jr.'s Understanding of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Dalit Liberation Movement: An Intersectional Analysis of Race and Caste
Organizers: Krishan Kumar
Caste has long been a subject of scholarly debate worldwide. It is not merely an identity but a central pillar of Indian society, representing a system of social relations that distinguishes Indian...
Keywords: caste, discrimination, Dalit, Exclusion, liberation, Emancipation., african american studies
Date Submitted: July 2, 2026
Literary Criticism as Theory of Mind
Organizers: Yael Segalovitz
David Kurnick has argued that recent methodological debates in literary studies offer us “not new ways to interpret texts but… powerful images of what kind of people we are when we interpret.” This...
Keywords: #theory, ethics of reading, subjectivity, theory of mind, institutional and disciplinary histories
Date Submitted: July 1, 2026
Across Borders, Across Texts: Echoes, Revision, and Rewritings in Black Literature
Organizers: Samuel Adewumi
In the introduction to the Fourth Edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie Smith emphasize the imitativeness of literature—Black li...
Keywords: Black Atlantic, imitation, Intertextuality, African American Literature, #diaspora #Africa
Date Submitted: July 1, 2026
(Forced-) Migration, Refugee, Exile and the Crises of Humanitarian Regimes in Literature, Arts, and Media
Organizers: Ayse Irem Karabag
“We are now in the middle of a deep and decisive moment towards a more disciplinary, authoritarian kind of society,” says Stuart Hall in his speech for Human Rights Day in 1979 (78). He proceeds to...
Keywords: #migration, critical refugee studies, Exile, humanitarianism, border
Date Submitted: July 1, 2026
Women’s Writings against Oppression in the Middle East and South Asia
Organizers: Feroza Jussawalla
Proposal for an ACLA Seminar in Houston 2027 Women’s Writings against Oppression in the Middle East and South Asia Dr. Feroza Jus...
Keywords: Contemporary Muslim women's Writing, from the Middle East, Iranian Studies, Iranian women's writing, Censorship
Date Submitted: June 29, 2026
Attuning to Noise: Other Modalities of Sounding, Listening, and Writing
Organizers: Yiren Zheng
As a concept, noise gathers a multitude of meanings, complexities, and contradictions. It is not an ontological category that stands stably on its own; what makes noise a meaningful thing depends o...
Keywords: Noise, Voice, sound studies, #media, accent; accented thinking and criticism; voice; media; identity studies; sound studies; translation, #translation
Date Submitted: June 29, 2026
South-South Comparatism: Problems and Perspectives
Organizers: José Luís Jobim, Waïl Hassan
Since at least the 19th century, a strand of comparatism developed which declared itself inter-nationalist but was in fact colonialist or neocolonialist. Its procedure began with the very selection...
Keywords: South-South Comparatism
Date Submitted: June 29, 2026
Aesthetics: Questions, Problems, Puzzles
Organizers: Robert Lehman, Jess Keiser
Since its origins in the eighteenth century, aesthetics has advanced by uncovering a series of problems—problems that have sometimes thrown aesthetics itself, as a philosophical enterprise, into do...
Keywords: aesthetics, kant, hegel, art and philosophy, analytic philosophy, philosophy of art, continental philosophy
Date Submitted: June 29, 2026
Translating Theory for a Worldly Comparative Literature
Organizers: Bhavya Tiwari, David Damrosch
In the last two decades, a more worldly comparative literature has emerged in the US by centering literary translation and translation studies as philosophical and methodological principles in both...
Keywords: comparative literature, translation, world literature, literary theory
Date Submitted: June 27, 2026
Tales from the Periphery: Narrating the Enslaved, the Outcast, and the Marginalized in the Ottoman Empire
Organizers: Burcu Karahan, İclal Vanwesenbeeck
This seminar takes as its subject those who lived on the margins of the Ottoman Empire — enslaved persons, sexual outsiders, intellectual dissenters, ethnic and religious minorities, the disabled, ...
Keywords: The Ottoman Empire, slavery, gender, race, literary history, 19th century
Date Submitted: June 27, 2026
Who Curates the Nation? Museums and the Remaking of Pakistan after 1971
Organizers: Chaman Hussain
The separation of East Pakistan in 1971 was a defining moment in the country's history. While scholars have examined its political, military, and diplomatic consequences in detail, less attention h...
Keywords: Museum Studies, National Memory, Public History, narrative, Pakistan, 1971 War.
Date Submitted: June 27, 2026
Communities of Attention
Organizers: Jose R. Ruisánchez Serra, Mabel Cuesta
Works and practices that command and reward sustained attention, and that create communities of readers, spectators, or listeners around them, are the focus of this seminar.In an era marked ...
Date Submitted: June 26, 2026
The Role of the Author Reconsidered in Narrative Theory
Organizers: Ming Dong Gu
Since the appearance of New Criticism, authorial intention as a guideline for reading and interpreting literary works has been almost totally discredited. With the appearance of poststr...
Keywords: role of the author; conscious and unconscious intentions; reader response; overt and covert plot; narrative theory
Date Submitted: June 25, 2026
Exemplarity and Comparability
Organizers: Carson Welch, Alya Ansari
The selection of “cases” is a fundamental aspect of literary criticism. As early as 1952, Erich Auerbach observed that choosing a proper Ansatzpunkt is an important task for...
Keywords: exemplarity, comparison, Criticism, Method, judgement
Date Submitted: June 24, 2026
Comparison, Language, Media: Disciplinary Futures Beyond the Information Age
Organizers: Akshya Saxena, Michael Allan
What becomes of comparison when language is operationalized as data, translation is increasingly automated, and media infrastructures condition every act of reading, writing, and circulat...
Keywords: Language technologies, mediation, LLMs, Machine Translation, Scripts, infrastructure
Date Submitted: June 24, 2026
Experimental Short Fiction: In the Shadow of Donald Barthelme
Organizers: R. M. Corbin
Donald Barthelme was one of the founders of the Creative Writing program at the University of Houston: he also remains one of the most influential experimental fiction writers of the twentieth cent...
Keywords: postmodern fiction, postmodernism, barthelme, Short fiction, Short story, short story studies
Date Submitted: June 24, 2026
Watering the Fields: Porous Hydrocritical Practice in Precarious Times
Organizers: Amanda Smith, Lisa Blackmore
The world’s waterways are in trouble. Rivers have been dammed and dredged to the point of altering the earth’s axis. Industrial and agricultural processes as well as deficient waste manag...
Keywords: hydrocriticism, hydrohumanities, hydrocommons, hydro-politics, water activism, artivism, environmental humanities
Date Submitted: June 23, 2026
The Contemporary Legacies of Cultural Marxism
Organizers: Ashwin Bajaj, Modhumita Roy
In one of his final works, Inventions of a Present (2024), Fredric Jameson suggests that it is not the critic “but reality itself [that] is Marxist in its structure.” Reading this alongsid...
Keywords: contemporary marxism, critique, Literature and politics, utopian thinking, literary form, abstraction
Date Submitted: June 23, 2026
Comparative Literature: Why Compare, Today?
Organizers: Esther (Ye Ram) Kim, Natalie Cortez Klossner
This seminar returns to a foundational question of our discipline: Why compare, today? In an era defined by rapid technological shifts, ecological crises, and ...
Keywords: Comparative literary studies, transdisciplinary
Date Submitted: June 23, 2026
#WeirdGirlLit: Why Do Girls Just Want to Be Weird?
Organizers: Kelly Ferguson, Brittany Frodge
Although internet culture may have brought about the hashtag #WeirdGirlLit,” women authors have long used writing to explore taboo and forbidden topics deemed beyond the purview of p...
Keywords: feminism, horror, gothic, Weird fiction, hispanic studies, international
Date Submitted: June 23, 2026
Hegel and Literature
Organizers: Henrique Carvalho Pereira
In Positions, Derrida stated that “we will never be finished with the reading or rereading of the Hegelian text.” Hegel's impact on all areas of thought cannot be overstated, and literary ...
Keywords: hegel, #theory, philosophy and literature, Comparative literary studies, German
Date Submitted: June 22, 2026
Reading After the Algorithm: Digital Platforms, Literary Communities and the Transformation of Reading Culture
Organizers: Aman Grewal
In the contemporary digital era reading is no longer solely a private or solitary act. Literary engagement is shaped by interactive, algorithmic and participatory cultures that influence how ...
Date Submitted: June 22, 2026
Secrecy as Structure, Theory, Genre
Organizers: Yoon Sun Lee, Penny Fielding
If privacy exists as a historical realm of experience or social concern, secrecy is different in being at once more specific and less amenable to representation. Unlike the private, which...
Keywords: secrets, epistemology, narrative, history, spies
Date Submitted: June 22, 2026
Sex, Gender, and the 70s
Organizers: Dana Glaser, Robyn Wiegman
The theoretical debates that have animated the field of gender and sexuality studies are haunted by the specter of the feminist 1970s and its alter-ego, “the Second Wave.” Sometimes, this haunting ...
Keywords: gender and sexuality, aesthetics and politics, historiography, 20th and 21st centuries
Date Submitted: June 20, 2026
Uneven Modernities and the Middle East
Organizers: Zahra Meshkani
As the study of modernity continues to move beyond diffusionist models that treat it as a singular project radiating outward from Western Europe, the comparative study of regional and alternative m...
Keywords: #Modernism, MIddle East, Arabic Literature, Persian, Turkish, Global South
Date Submitted: June 20, 2026
Fictions of Dependency
Organizers: Pelin Kivrak
Liberal modernity has long privileged ideals of autonomy, self-sufficiency, independence, and individual agency. Yet many of the most compelling novels and films of the twenty-first century appear inc...
Keywords: Politics of Care, Dependency, Contemporary fiction, domesticity, precarity, disability
Date Submitted: June 19, 2026
Southern Unpleasantness
Organizers: Shwetha Chandrashekhar
In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization, Neetu Khanna rightly contends that decolonization in the twenty-first century must undo the “emotive lessons in the habits of mind and memory of t...
Keywords: Global South, Affect, Postcolonial, decolonial, Representation of violence, negativity
Date Submitted: June 18, 2026
That Makes a Poem: Emerson’s Definition
Organizers: Johanna Winant
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet” includes this definition of poetry: “For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the s...
Keywords: #poetry, poetics, philosophy and literature
Date Submitted: June 18, 2026
vernacular literature and architecture
Organizers: Sayed Ahmed
Bangladesh's rich vernacular architecture and rich folk realm showcase its rich history and cultural diversity. However, due to lack of documentation and European colonization, the nation's cultura...
Keywords: decolonization, Bangladesh, Bangla folk literature, Vernacular architecture, Settlement patterns.
Date Submitted: June 17, 2026
“Lost in Translation”
Organizers: Thais Rutledge
According to André Lefevere, translations and interpretations of literary works can become distorted because they are never neutral acts. In his theory of rewriting, Lefevere argues that translator...
Keywords: translation, world literature, Literary Criticism
Date Submitted: June 17, 2026
Signifying Bodies
Organizers: Rebecca Saunders
This seminar will examine how human bodies function as a medium of signification, how various forms of power (authoritarian, patriarchal, religious, legal, military) signify through or on the body,...
Keywords: bodies, embodiment, bodily expression, (il)legible bodies, biopolitics
Date Submitted: June 16, 2026
Literary Edibles
Organizers: Ali Kulez
Over the last two decades, we have seen a surge of scholarship at the intersection of Food Studies and New Materialist theory. Thinkers like Elspeth Probyn (2000; 2016), Jane Bennett (2010), Annema...
Keywords: food studies, New Materialism, nationalism, critical animal studies, racial capitalism, queer studies
Date Submitted: June 16, 2026
Literature Without Return: Poetics and Sociology of the Long Exile
Organizers: Anchit Sathi
Most exile literature imagines return. Even when homecoming is structurally impossible, the originary homeland remains the gravitational centre around which the displaced writer orients. This semin...
Keywords: Exile, diaspora, postmemory, world literature, language death, literary sociology
Date Submitted: June 16, 2026
Cosmopolitanisms from Below: Voices from the Global South
Organizers: Ishan Mehandru, Supurna Dasgupta
Postcolonial thinking has often been defined by questions of cosmopolitan and pluralist living in the decolonizing world: through figurations of exile and unrootedness (Edward Said, Eqbal...
Keywords: cosmopolitanism, Postcolonial, Global South, solidarity, multiculturalism
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
The Poverty of Literature
Organizers: Gabriel Quigley
How does literature represent poverty? Is poverty available for representation? The title of this seminar is taken from Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy, which, in turn, subverts Proudhon’...
Keywords: poverty, postcolonialism, precarity, testimony, capitalism, human rights
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Procedural Poetry Now: Precedents, Tools, Goals
Organizers: Jim Goar
In a 1965 Vancouver lecture, Jack Spicer remarked, “I’m sure I could compose a Blake prophetic book on a computer with a very little bit of programming for the tape.” Spicer imagined a poem-machine...
Keywords: Procedural poetry; electronic literature; computer poetry; digital humanities; generative writing; constraint; AI-assisted code
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Final Stop
Organizers: Kate Jenckes
This seminar invites reflection on the question of how to think, represent, or respond to finality. With this, we have in mind a concern about end, exhaustion, or boundary that extends from ancient...
Keywords: extinction, end times, apocalypse, #theory, #Narrative
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
A Poetics Beyond Wounds
Organizers: Taylor Roberts
A poetics of the body is a poetics of disruption, and with disruption comes the fracturing of space and flesh. Writing on a black poetics and confronting the quest for artistic mastery, writer Dawn...
Keywords: #poetry, #literature, poetics, #politics, literary studies
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Beyond French Theory: Mid-Century French Thought and Literary Studies
Organizers: Audrey Wasser, Eleanor Kaufman
Literary studies in the U.S. has been influenced by a cast of postwar French thinkers whose names are by now familiar: Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Barthes, and others. And yet some...
Keywords: French philosophy, epistemology, rationalism, normativity, vitalism, aesthetics, phenomenology, literary theory
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Nostalgia in Catastrophic Times: Re-Imagining Pasts & Futures in Russian and Eastern/Central European Literature and Creative Media
Organizers: Dragoslav Momcilovic
In her 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym argues that nostalgia is an affective experience based on two simultaneous forms of longing to return home: one palliative and comfo...
Keywords: Catastrophe, nostalgia, Russian literature, Southern and Eastern European literatures and theory
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Theory after Extinction
Organizers: Jeffrey Di Leo, Christian Moraru
Given recent attempts to redefine life along non-biological and more-than-organic lines, questions of extinction need to be extended past the living and the sentient as traditionally understood. We...
Keywords: theory; extinction; Anthropocene; decolonization; class; materiality; World Literature; Big Data; the unconscious; gender; genre
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Literature on Trial: Law, Society, and the Imagination of Justice
Organizers: EMMA LINFORD
This seminar brings together new work in comparative literature, legal studies, and cultural history to explore the relationship between literary representation and the social and legal issues that...
Keywords: law and literature
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
(Non-)Home(liness) in Iranian Literature, Culture, and Art
Organizers: Arash Shokrisaravi, Claudia Yaghoobi
In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa remarks: “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back.” Taking Anzaldúa’s mobile and embodied understanding of home ...
Keywords: Iranian Studies, Home and Homeland, Diaspora and Transnationalism, Exile, alienation, Minoritization, Cultural Production.
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Gulf Circulations: Transnational Ecologies and Environmental Humanities
Organizers: Tori Bush
This seminar convenes Cuban, Mexican, and U.S. Gulf South scholars to theorize the Gulf of Mexico as a transnational zone of ecological entanglement, rather than a set of discrete national environm...
Keywords: Gulf of Mexico, environmental humanities, transnational, Plantationocene
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Arts of Thinking
Organizers: Magdalena Ostas
This seminar brings together new work in the field of literature and philosophy on the topic of thinking. It looks to works of literature and art to deepen our conception of what thinking is and wh...
Keywords: Literature and Philosophy, art and philosophy, aesthetics, ancient quarrel, thinking, understanding
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Palestine/Israel, Colonialism, Capitalism
Organizers: Oded Nir, Zahi Zalloua
This seminar aims to discuss the different ways colonialism and capitalism are related in Palestine/Israel; and, conversely, how Palestinian/Israeli anti-colonial politics is related to c...
Keywords: capitalism, colonialism, Palestine, Israel
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
Global Counterpublics and/in the Periodical:
Organizers: MARINA BILBIJA
For centuries, periodical culture transported literary and political texts outside of their national contexts and delivered them to new publics. It is surprising, then, that the compo...
Keywords: periodical studies, African American Literature, postcolonial literature, print culture, counterpublics
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026