206 seminars found
Disalienated Writing: Combat Literature, Resistance Literature & Beyond
Organizers: Maru Pabón, Tobi Haslett
Although the prevailing literary history doesn’t present it this way, the 1961 publication of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth falls between the release of two of the most importan...
Keywords: anticolonialism, postcolonial studies, Marxism, Third Worldism, literary form
Date Submitted: August 2, 2026
Talking Differently: Marginalised Women and the Forms of Intersectionality in South Asia
Organizers: Nandini Gayen, Tamanna Priya
Intersectionality has become the default grammar for writing about marginalised women in South Asia. It arrived from a particular genealogy - Black feminist jurisprudence in the United St...
Keywords: intersectionality, caste, South Asian Literature, gender, #translation
Date Submitted: August 2, 2026
'Claiming Ocean on Land': Migrant Subjects and Oceanic Ways of Being
Organizers: Yumna Siddiqi, Isabela Bahadorzadeh
The title of our panel is inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs's injunction to learn from marine mammals’ ways of being and knowing that are antithetical to those of gendered racial capitalism (Und...
Keywords: migration, borders, border-crossing, oceanic imaginaries, Dionne Brand, blue humanities
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Infrastructures of Work: Labor, Affect, and Narrative Form
Organizers: Jennifer Mason, Ayana Dey
Who gets to be the protagonist of work? Why do some forms of labor readily sustain narrative interiority while others appear only as background conditions for someone else's story? This s...
Keywords: Labor, narrative form, Affect, infrastructure, globalization
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Going Beyond the Literary IV : Caribbean practices of freedom in spaces of constraint
Organizers: Jeannine Murray-Román, Kavita Singh
This seminar explores Caribbean practices of freedom within contexts of constraint, from historical and present-day forms of grand and petit marronage to community movements of protest, and the yar...
Keywords: Caribbean, #interdisciplinary humanities, #postcolonial
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Going Beyond the Literary IV : Caribbean practices of freedom in spaces of constraint
Organizers: Jeannine Murray-Román, Kavita Singh
This seminar explores Caribbean practices of freedom within contexts of constraint, from historical and present-day forms of grand and petit marronage to community movements of protest, and the yar...
Keywords: Caribbean, #interdisciplinary humanities, #postcolonial
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Girlhoods in South Asia: Straddling Tradition and Modernity
Organizers: Usha Mudiganti
Contemporary girlhoods in South Asian nations are caught in the crosshairs between tradition and modernity. This assertion is backed by literature written by women in many of the languages in which...
Keywords: girlhood, postcolonialism, Indian Literaute, South Asian Literature, Childhood Studies, Literary Studies.
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Uncomfortable and Unclassifiable Bodies: Corporeal Aesthetics in Chinese and World Feminist Cinemas
Organizers: Huiqiang Dong
Since the 1990s, film phenomenology, affect theory and feminist corporeal thought have increasingly redirected attention from the body primarily as an image or sign toward the lived, sensory, mater...
Keywords: embodiment, Affect, feminist cinema, Chinese cinema
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
From Authenticity to Commodity: Italian Food in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture
Organizers: Ryan Calabretta-Sajder
This seminar proposes to examine Italian and Italian American food studies through the comparative frameworks of transnational circulation, intermedial representation, and cultural translation. Rat...
Keywords: food studies, Italian, Italian American, translation, mediation, Cultural Circulation
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
Melodrama and Realism
Organizers: Joao Marcos Copertino
This seminar aims to foster a conversation on either melodramatic works that aspire to realism or realist works and their reliance on melodrama. We invite analyses of all forms of media, with a par...
Keywords: the operatic, melodrama, realism, cinema, opera, theater
Date Submitted: August 1, 2026
South-South Literary Relations and the Remaking of World Literature
Organizers: Ann George
Since the rise of World Literature as a major field of inquiry, discussions of literary circulation have often privileged routes that pass through metropolitan centers, emphasizing translation into...
Keywords: comparative literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, critical translation studies, Decolonial Methodologies
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Latinx Literatures North of the 49th Parallel
Organizers: Tania Aguila-Way, Bárbara Simões Daibert
Canada has been a site of literary activity by multiple Latin American diasporas going back to at least the 1970s, when writers who arrived as political exiles from Chile, Brazil, Uruguay...
Keywords: Latinx literature, Canadian Literture, hemispheric studies, Diaspora and Transnationalism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Field Is Not a Canon! : The Reproduction of Capital and Fields at Universities
Organizers: Cal Smith
In Theory (2018), Dionne Brand writes that “the true purpose of the academy…[is] to produce layers of managers of capital in one way or another, to carry out and extend ...
Keywords: literary field, academia, Affect studies, epistemological revolution
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Emotions and Violence in Early Modern Iberia
Organizers: moises machuca
Emotions and Violence in Early Modern War operates across two axes: technology and discipline, while converging on emotions. Over the past fifteen years, early modern scholars have begun ...
Keywords: Emotions, war, sixteenth century
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Punishment and Privilege: The Cinema of Peter Watkins
Organizers: Rosa Martinez
By the time he passed away at the age of 90, British filmmaker Peter Watkins had cemented his legacy as one of the preeminent media scholars of the late-20th and early 21st centuries. Ove...
Keywords: #Film, #Cinema, #film and media, #media studies, #peter watkins, #documentary
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Prophecy, Symbolism, and Revolutionary Politics
Organizers: Nick Thacker, Chase Hobbs-Morgan
Why resurrect the work of Norman O. Brown?Norman O. Brown’s corpus spoke to many concerns that characterize our contemporary moment. Life Against D...
Keywords: islam, psychoanalysis, literalism, prophecy, politics/metapolitics
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Rhetoric of Literary Craft: Between Theoretical Criticism and Creative Writing
Organizers: Ziqi Jin
More than six decades after The Rhetoric of Fiction, in which Wayne Booth foregrounds the reciprocal relationship between literary creation and literary reception, the disciplinary divide ...
Keywords: Literary Criticism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Asian America’s Misanthropic Subjects
Organizers: Kiran Lam-Saili, Ashley Aye Aye Dun
Over twenty years ago, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Race and Resistance claimed Asian American studies was stuck in a “model minorities” vs. “bad subjects” binary when evaluatin...
Keywords: Asian American literature, asian american studies, aesthetics and politics, film and media
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
American Small-Town Myths
Organizers: Kevin O'Connor
The diner, whether in Kerouac or Lahiri, plays a central role in American mythmaking. Diners are, paradoxically, insular nexuses of togetherness. Like the hearth or the cafeteria, they ex...
Keywords: Myth, American Studies, structuralism, poststructuralism, food studies, capitalism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The American Orientalism/s and/or Orientalism in the Americas
Organizers: Subhas Yadav
Edward Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism (1978), proved to be a watershed moment in the critical study of Orientalism across the world. Orientalism (1978) not only accelerated a dis...
Keywords: orientalism, Litertures of the Americas, New Orientalism, Transpacific Studies (2621, modernismo
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Ways of Water: Exploring Legacies of Trauma in Blue Infrastructure
Organizers: Asmita Saha, Jordan Grunawalt
We are living in a time of extreme weather, ecological shift, and infrastructural decay, much of which is related to questions surrounding water. To further analyze the ways that water...
Keywords: blue humanities, infrastructure, critical trauma studies, environmental humanities
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Sinologising Witnessing: Trauma Theory and Chinese Literature and Films
Organizers: Yuan Liu, Shannon Gilbert
Three decades on, the founding categories of trauma theory (e.g., belatedness, aporia, the unspeakable) remain largely those of a single archive: European, modernist, post-Holocaust. Stef Craps’s d...
Keywords: trauma theory, Witnessing, Chinese literature and films, atrocity, ghost, memory studies
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Diasporic Voices, Aesthetic Choices in Anglophone Long Form Poetry
Organizers: Deirdre Osborne, Angela Jacobs
In stating that poetic form be ‘centre stage in any discussion of poetry’ Hurley and O’Neill (2012) propose, ‘Form is a poem’s principle of life. It is protean, multiple, ever-changing’. This ...
Keywords: Black, diasporic, long form poetry, Anglophone, aesthetics, experimental writing, dramatic monologue
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Social(list) AI
Organizers: Chenrui Zhao
The proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence, and AI in general, demands a restructuring of the humanities. In Language Machines, Leif Weatherby has convincingly argued that generative A...
Keywords: digital humanities
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Technologies of realism, a taste for description, and strong styles of authenticity
Organizers: Olivera Jokic, Kathleen E. Urda
In another moment of disorienting technological change, we are learning how to read and write again. Against dire warnings about the decline of ‘reading for pleasure’ in conventional literary forms...
Keywords: realism, empire, machine learning, publics, counterpublics, character, fiction, AI
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Poetic Thinking and Civic Humanities
Organizers: Gundela Hachmann
In Hannah Arendt’s work The Human Condition, natality, as the human capacity for bringing something new into the world, is closely related to her passionate defense of thinking. By thinkin...
Keywords: Civic Humanities, Civic Engagement, Hannah Arendt, comparative literature, poetics of imagination
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Authorizing Documents
Organizers: James Kiselik, Jeff Noh
What do scholars of comparative literary studies gain when we shift our attention to the document—a bureaucratically inflected term that conjures up the selective processes of “fact-assembly” (Trou...
Keywords: archives, documents, literary history
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Textualities of Architecture: Reading across Literature and the Built Environment
Organizers: Marcel Brousseau
This seminar uses the occasion of the ACLA’s convening in Houston—an “architectural treasure house,” in Stephen Fox’s words—as an opportunity to investigate intersections of literature, t...
Keywords: Architecture, Media and Technology, history, race, gender, sexuality, place
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Poetry and Pop
Organizers: Matthew Kilbane, Nidhi Surendranath
This seminar will convene a chorus of new approaches to the study of poetry and global pop music, sister arts dynamized by dizzying asymmetries. Where and when they are practiced as disti...
Keywords: #poetry, song, music, lyric, lyric studies, sound studies, popular culture
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Reading In Vivo: Biopoetics Beyond Informatics
Organizers: Renee Wehrle
Over the last several years, the intersection of poetry, data, and information theory has garnered more critical attention, with monographs such as Paul Stephens’ The Poetics of ...
Keywords: #media, poetics, biopolitics, information theory, body
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
'Less Is Morbid': Theorizing Queer Excess
Organizers: Samia Rahimtoola, Brandon Menke
With this seminar, we seek to theorize how queer excess emerges as both a praxis and condition of non-normative relationality. We take our inspiration from Arthur Jafa's 2025/26 MoMA exhi...
Keywords: queer theory, aesthetics, excess, maximalism, intermediality, art and literature, ecocriticism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Comparison, Institutionizing, and Conflict
Organizers: Jacob McGuinn
Comparative literature often understands its disciplinary origins at moments of conflict. Acts of comparison frequently work in the disruption of international systems, identifying emerging politic...
Keywords: institutional and disciplinary histories, conflict, peace, world literature, methodology
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Politics of Criticism: After Said, After Identity Politics
Organizers: Benjamin Schreier
Forty years ago, Edward Said wrote, “The history of thought, to say nothing of political movements, is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum ‘solidarity before criticism’ means the end of cr...
Keywords: Criticism, politics, identity, solidarity, Edward Said, biopolitics
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Rights, Representation, and the Rule of Law
Organizers: Drew Johnson, Hannah Hussamy
What are the affordances of attending to cultural objects as sources engaged in the study of legal processes? Writers past and present– from Franz Kafka, to Sara Uribe, to David Foster Wa...
Keywords: immigration, bureaucracy, bureaucratic subjectivity, critical legal studies, asylum
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
World Literature and Critical Pedagogy: Reimagining the University in Modern Times
Organizers: Tayseer Abu Odeh
We have witnessed an unprecedented juncture of historical crisis, marked by the systematic erosion of democratic norms, the intensification of mass militarization, depoliticization of the universit...
Keywords: neoliberalism, anti-fascism, the Global South, epistemological revolution, academic freedom
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Global Perspectives on Racial Capitalism
Organizers: Ajay Batra, Aaron Bartels-Swindells
Over the past two decades, scholars in literary and cultural studies, history, and critical theory increasingly have used the conceptual lens of “racial capitalism” to analyze the roles of race, et...
Keywords: race, capitalism, colonialism, empire, class, Black radicalism, Marxism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
'Asia' after World Literature
Organizers: CHRISTOPHER BUSH, Adhira Mangalagiri
Despite its connections with Western imperial cartography and orientalist philology, “Asia” has played an essential role in the articulation of a wide range of national and regional identities in m...
Keywords: Asia, world literature, #nationalism, empire
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
When the Hand Thinks Back: Craft, Translation, and the Politics of ‘Secondary’ Aesthetics
Organizers: Rindon Kundu
What if craft is not the lesser twin of art, but another theory of making, one in which the hand thinks, the material answers, and form emerges through a dialogue with earth, fibre, clay, ...
Keywords: craft, #translation, #aesthetics, capitalism, creative translation, comparative, art
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Militarization and Ecosystems
Organizers: Scarlett Croft, Robert Marzec
In Foucault’s lecture series, Society Must be Defended (1975-76) he shifts his analysis of power from the framework of discipline to security. Contained within this differentiat...
Keywords: Environmentalism, militirization, environmental humanities, defence, ecologies.
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Biomythographies: Self-Fabulation in the Time of Autotheory
Organizers: Iliana Cuellar, Erin Lam
The term autotheory was coined by Stacey Young in Changing the Wor(l)d (1997) to describe the work of the women of color writers and activists behind Kitchen Table Pres...
Keywords: autotheory, Feminist and Queer Theory, intersectionality, fabulation
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Cuba on the Verge (Again): Cross-National and Intercultural Dialogues
Organizers: Conrad James
Precarity, uncertainty, rupture and calamitous transition have defined the political history of Cuba for centuries. The Cuban twentieth century, for example, saw several revolutions and various dic...
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Aesthetics for Amateurs
Organizers: Brian Glavey, Laura Heffernan
Critical theory has tended to account for the aesthetic almost exclusively in terms of consumption, emphasizing aesthetics as a mode of perception or a kind of experience. While the migra...
Keywords: aesthetics, object relations, creativity, craft
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Embodiment Hunger: Reading Bodies in Community After AI
Organizers: Anna Mukamal, Gabriel Hankins
This seminar asks how embodied readers and communities still matter after AI. As the AI giants harvest texts, surveil clicks, and monetize every act of attention, how are literary communi...
Keywords: embodiment, book history, literary studies, digital humanities, feminism, AI
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Disaffected Abilities
Organizers: Rabia Wasif
This seminar attempts to further examine Xine Yao’s theory of Disaffection, that axis on the politics of sentimentalism and produces the forms of ‘unfeeling’. These forms entail resistance to affec...
Keywords: Disaffect, unfeeling, ableism, ability, geopolitics, cultural politics
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Global Perspectives on Rootedness
Organizers: Federica Di Blasio
Christy Wampole’s Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (2016) examines how 20th-century French and German literature and philosophy literalize the botanic metaphor of roots to navig...
Keywords: rootedness, nationalism, globalization, metaphors, Belonging, identity, place, displacement, diaspora, vegetal poetics
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Dialectics of Internationalism
Organizers: Simran Vijan, Majorca Bateman-Coe
There is a growing acknowledgement—enabled by social media, public facing activists, and most importantly, and the increasingly complex network of global systems of oppression—that struggles are no...
Keywords: Internationalism, combined and uneven development, Socialist Internationalism, world-system
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Concept of Seriality
Organizers: Jeroen Gerrits, Sandra Laugier
With its play of repetition and variation, resemblance and difference, simultaneity and succession, breaks and continuities, the concept of seriality has become an increasingly vital mode of cultur...
Keywords: seriality, series, aesthetics, philosophy, literature, film and television, Media and Technology, digital culture
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Creating and comparing Literary Archives in the Digital Age
Organizers: Jey Sushil, Amardeep Singh
As we wade through the murky waters of the generative AI era, and the ingestion and regurgitation of information by large language models, the need to create new archives through human intervention...
Keywords: Digital Archives, digital culture, Global South, Digital Literary Archives
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Difficult Literature
Organizers: Kris Trujillo, Amy Hollywood
When readers complain that a piece of literature is too hard, they can be responding to textual opacity, intense and viscerally disturbing subject matter, unlikable characters, the range of referen...
Keywords: difficulty, Affect, reading, Resistance, complaint, crisis, experimental writing
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Communal Life, Abolition, and Space
Organizers: William Trlak, Angela Cai
Displacement describes the condition of lacking a home in a world in which a home is required to gain access to the privileges of citizenship. The condition of transitory figures inhabiti...
Keywords: Spatiality, abolition, carcerality, art and literature, public life, Marxism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Humanities Beyond Text: Knowledge, Creativity, and Engagement in the Age of AI
Organizers: Rebecca Ehrenwirth, Junjie Luo
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how research is conducted, disseminated, and consumed. As AI increasingly assists with literature reviews, translation, drafting, and even ...
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, creativity, humanities, humanities education
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
A Kropotkin Cooperative
Organizers: Amanda Jo Goldstein, Mari Jarris
Kropotkin never became an “-ism,” and those who read and walked with him never became Kropotkinists. Instead, the anarcho-communist biogeographer spread ideas that circulated too...
Keywords: Kropotkin, communism, anarchism, geography, mutual aid, prison, ecology, anti-imperialism
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Asymmetrical Mimesis: Cross-Genre /Cross-Cultural Poetics
Organizers: Barrett Watten, Lauri Scheyer
This seminar will focus on innovative poetic, hybrid, and nonnarrative literary works and other artistic forms that work across genres, media, and languages. What brings them together is a concept ...
Keywords: poetics, aesthetics, performance, jazz, African American, Language writing, Poets Theater, experimental translation
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Encountering Whiteness: Race, Nation, and Assimilation
Organizers: Anwesha Kundu
The unfulfilled desire to be assimilated into White culture and the resultant melancholia have been read as central wounds of minority subjecthood within formally multiethnic nations like...
Keywords: race, whiteness, Affect, Postcolonial, asian american studies, black studies
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
No Relation
Organizers: Shonni Enelow, Julia Jarcho
No RelationA new relation among fragments would arrive as a sentence of obscene incommensurability.—Lisa Robertson, Riverwork
Keywords: relationality; comparison; queer theory; aesthetic theory
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Tech between Cultural Fantasy and Political Form
Organizers: Ben Baer, Zahid Chaudhary
What are the connective currents between digital technology and the cultural-political forms of libertarianism, neoreaction, posthumanism, and secessionist right-wing theory and practice? Why do cu...
Keywords: digital technologies, Contemporary Digital Culture, fascism, literary theory
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
The Bird-Symbol in Attar, Rumi and Lalon’s Poetry: A Critical Comparative Study
Organizers: mostofa tarequl Ahsan
AbstractIt’s actually a matter of rethinking that from the inception of Sufism the term `bird’ is, somehow, associated with the spiritual world of Sufism. From Neishapour to Kustia, al...
Keywords: sufism, Fariduddin Attar, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, Fakir Lalon Shah
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Ever-So-Slightly Radioactive: Reading Women’s Magazines Otherwise
Organizers: Alejandra Vela Martínez, Catalina Rodriguez
Magazines are “ever so slightly radioactive,” Jeff Jarvis writes in his Object Lessons volume on the form. The phrase, which refers to traces of uranium and thorium in the k...
Keywords: Mass culture, feminist studies, publics, Periodicals, ephemera
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Historicizing Black Aesthetics: Form and the Ethics of Representation
Organizers: Andrew Avalos, Laine Barriga
The latest trajectory of Black aesthetics has been characterized by the overlapping yet competing terms of the New Black Aesthetic (NBA), post-soul aesthetic, and post-Blackness. The desi...
Keywords: aesthetics, Post-Soul, New Black Aesthetic, form, Genre, representation, refusal
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Poeticality and Indigenous Inhumanities: Refusing Settler Life
Organizers: Anthony Alessandrini
This seminar is inspired by two important new books: Jeffrey Sacks’ Poeticality: In Refusal of Settler Life&nb...
Keywords: indigeneity, settler colonialism and racial capitalism, poetics and visual aesthetics, Palestine
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Speculative Infrastructure
Organizers: Philip Bonanno, Christian Haines
Infrastructure can be understood as an apparatus that supports and enables human life. However, infrastructure can also be differentially allocated, destroyed, eroded, and abandoned...
Keywords: infrastructure, speculative fiction, #aesthetics, #ecology, Planetarity
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Political Iatrogenesis: Ivan Illich, the nongovernable, and the question of limits
Organizers: José Luis Suárez Morales, Daniel Runnels
Despite his relative marginalization in the theoretical humanities, the work of Ivan Illich has returned to the scene in the wake of interest from Giorgio Agamben as well as the reedition of his wo...
Keywords: Ivan Illich, #theory, Agamben, Tiqqun, modernity, anarchism, Latin America
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
On Community: Social Forms in Literature and the Arts
Organizers: Song Abel Han, Fangdai Chen
Contemporary literature and the arts have taken a community turn. Across diverse cultural contexts, writers and artists conduct fieldwork, interview local residents, participate in social movements...
Keywords: community, contemporary history of art, Sinophone, Social form, multispecies community
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Encountering the non-human other: Interspecies empathy in global narrative media
Organizers: Thomas Fritz Maier, Jessica Schön
In recent years, fields like posthumanism, ecocriticism and critical animal studies have repeatedly discussed “[...] how the richness and complexity of non-human experience can be conveye...
Keywords: empathy, ecocriticism, animal studies, posthumanism, #feministliterature, #postcolonial
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Imagining Otherwise: The Literary Imagination Reconsidered
Organizers: Ravit Reichman, Patricio Boyer
We live in a moment when imagination, understood primarily as a future-oriented faculty, dominates public discourse on technology. Whether in the form of AI boosterism, technopessimist do...
Keywords: imagination, literariness, creativity, Artificial Intelligence, formalism, Innovation
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Cinematic Wastelands
Organizers: Kate Russell, Joshua Wiebe
“Many objects remain unnoticed simply because it never occurs to us to look their way. Most people turn their backs on garbage cans, the dirt underfoot, the waste they leave behind. Films have no ...
Keywords: cinema, film, images, trash, waste, garbage
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Futurism(s): Science Fiction, Technology, and Machine Aesthetics
Organizers: Sophia Farmer
In moments of crisis, artists and writers often turn to visions of the future as a means to escape, correct, or improve upon the flawed present. Today, much of the literary and artistic production ...
Keywords: Futurism, dystopia; science fiction; biopower, utopia, Humanoid Machine, Italian culture
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Translation and Transference
Organizers: Alwin Franke, Hannah Markley
If psychoanalysis is the talking cure, as Anna O. dubbed it, the subject of this discourse speaks in foreign tongues. In a literal sense, Anna lost her ability to speak in German, piecing ...
Keywords: translation theory, psychoanalysis, Freud, #translation
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Comparative Approaches to the Latinx Novel: Histories, Genealogies, and Hemispheric Formations
Organizers: William Orchard
This seminar proposes a comparative examination of the Latinx novel across national, linguistic, and historical formations. Rather than treating the Latinx novel as a stable or unified literary cat...
Keywords: Latinx literature, novel, literary history
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Singularity and Its Literary Forms
Organizers: Stephen Ross, Anjali Nerlekar
This seminar gathers new research on the topic of singularity across history, literature, and culture. Physics posits the big bang singularity as a point of immense gravitational density that destr...
Keywords: singularity, incommensurability, repeatability, uniqueness, circulation
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Proof
Organizers: Moya (Moyang) Li, Nan Da
What forms of proof show up in literary fiction? Colloquially, proofs are understood as incontrovertible evidence of a thing or event— as the strongest form of evidence. Yet, in pure ma...
Keywords: proof, evidence, epistemology, aesthetics, inference, archive
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Caribbean Literature and the Environment
Organizers: Carine Mardorossian
The environment in fiction is often discussed as a backdrop or "setting" that complements or reinforces characterization. This seminar will instead foreground this traditional background to explore...
Keywords: Caribbean Literature, #environment, #ecocriticism, Environmentail Humanities
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Healing a Ravaged Gaia through Narrative Ecologies: Folklore, Fairytales, Myths and Oral Traditions as Cultural Response to Climate Change
Organizers: Jagriti Upadhyaya
AbstractIn an increasingly chaotic global climate change and environmental degradation in the Anthropocene, where man has become a geological agent contributi...
Keywords: Anthropocene, ravaged ecologies, Myths, fairy tales, Folklore, healing.
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
William S. Burroughs as a Problem, Not a Subject
Organizers: ANTONIO JOSE BONOME GARCIA
This seminar proposes to examine William S. Burroughs as a problem. To achieve this goal, we invite provocative papers grounded in comparative methodologies and attentive to less...
Keywords: Burroughs, #Comparative approaches, #archive, Process, avant-garde, afterlives
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
Science and Ideology
Organizers: Jonathan Basile, Eric Reynolds
The prospect of a critique of scientific ideology (or a critique of ideological science) can seem inherently contradictory according to a doctrinaire interpretation of Marx’s conception o...
Keywords: French Theory, Derrida, deconstruction, Marxism, science, STS
Date Submitted: July 31, 2026
On the Move: Mobility and Narrative Agency Across Cultures
Organizers: Zhexi Yang
This panel explores how moving bodies, spaces, and experiences are represented and mediated across literary, visual, and cultural contexts. Focusing on mobility as both a lived experience and ...
Keywords: Mobility; Mediation; Narrative Agency; Historical Memory; Institutional Classification
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Ghosting Media: Infrastructure and the Limit of Perception in Global Asia
Organizers: Ka Lee Wong
Ghosts have long been understood as figures of return, haunting the present with unresolved histories (Derrida 1993; Gordon 1997; Sconce 2000; Zietlin 2007; Chen 2022). This panel shifts the focus ...
Keywords: media; media infrastructure; ghost; spectrality; perception; Global Asia; sound; voice; artificial intelligence; technology
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Sweetness and Trauma: A Cultural Analysis of the Human Taste
Organizers: Nan Wang, Lina Qu
Human predilection for sweetness is an innate, universal biological trait as much as a cultivated and personalized taste. One conspicuous paradox of modern sweetness is that it is rarely ...
Keywords: sweetness, trauma, social transformation, phenomenology, food studies, synesthesia, foodscape, smellscape, cultural memory
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Comparative Indigenous Literatures
Organizers: Jagravi Dave
While Indigenous literary studies has grown substantially over the past several decades, comparative approaches that place Indigenous texts, traditions, and intellectual frameworks in conversation ...
Keywords: indigenous literature, Postcolonial, Native American Literature, decolonial
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Paradigms of Obsession
Organizers: Arne Sander, Marco Calogero Battaglia
Recent linguistic analyses indicate a dramatic rise in the use of the word obsession over the last decade, a surge coinciding with a remarkable shift in its meaning. Althoug...
Keywords: obsession, psychoanalysis, compulsion, digital culture, Affect studies, #literatures
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Theaters of the Body: Imperial Medicine and the Decolonial Futures from the 19th century to Today
Organizers: Yuchen Yan, Nilufar Karimi
In his book, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016), Neel Ahuja’s theory of “the body as a transitional theater of imperial warfare” explores ...
Keywords: literature and medicine, postcolonial critique, dystopia; science fiction; biopower
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
The Supernatural/Human in SWANA/South Asian Regions
Organizers: Sarah Kaleem
What does it mean to be human? Sylvia Wynter dissects the notion of this question by interrogating the conflation between the formulation of the universalized Western bourgeois figure of Man throug...
Keywords: Feminist and Queer Theory, islam, critical humanities, fantasy, Monster; Human Rights; Body
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Bad Debt in Damaged Worlds
Organizers: Jorge Cartaya, Jessica Díaz Rodriguez
What would it mean to take up environmental crisis as a form of address? What kinds of responses do encounters with nonhuman life, elemental forces, and damaged environments demand? Inste...
Keywords: environmental humanities, bad debt, more-than-human ecologies, decolonial ecology, Environmental justice
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Montage Poetics Reconsidered
Organizers: Jack Chelgren, Kai Ihns
From modernism to the present, montage has been a powerful tool not just for filmmakers but for poets and theorists: a way of linking images, times, and places; of scoring rhythms, bridgi...
Keywords: montage, contemporary poetry, cinema, New Media, aesthetic theory, film and literature
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Miscellany Style
Organizers: Alexis Chema
Miscellanies, anthologies, and other collections that compile separate textual parts into bibliographic wholes have been studied by scholars interested in the organization of information, bibliogra...
Keywords: style, form, poetics, genre studies, book history, collecting, anthologies
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
The Political Role of Motherhood
Organizers: Elinore Darzi, Leonie Ettinger
Motherhood has been widely depicted in literature, theater, film, visual art and music, and critically examined in psychoanalysis, social theory and cultural criticism. Adrienne Rich dist...
Keywords: motherhood, family, #politics, Social Critique, birth, care, Cultural representation
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
The Taste of Memories: Nourishing the Self through Food Narratives
Organizers: Dan Luo
From the destroyed kitchen and rice field by villagers as punishment for her aunt’s infidelity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976), to the children’s hunger after their parents’...
Keywords: food, memory, autobiography, memoir, writing and the self
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Slavery's Domestic Economy
Organizers: Colin Drumm, Sean Capener
Recent work in the economic history of slavery has increasingly challenged what might be called the ‘labor theory of slavery’–the idea that the value of enslaved people for their enslaver...
Keywords: slavery, finance, Kinship, law, Households, Dynasty
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Exiled Twice: The Global South Text and the Terms of Its Reception
Organizers: Anas Abu Samhan, Nour Zerelli
Edward Said located exile in the "unhealable rift" between a self and its native place. This seminar transposes from the biographical to the institutional to examine exile as a structural...
Keywords: decolonial & World literature
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Being-With and It's Worlds: Ontology, Precarity, and the Politics of Shared Life
Organizers: Ana Luszczynska, Florian Grosser
Being-With and Its Worlds: Ontology, Precarity, and the Politics of Shared LifeThis seminar takes as its point of departure a philosophically crucial observation that Jean-L...
Keywords: aesthetics and politics, ontology, decolonial, Edouard Glissant, S. Hartman, JL Nancy, Judith Butler
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Combined and Uneven Modernism
Organizers: Pavel Andrade, Alys Moody
Discussing Kafka’s The Trial, Fredric Jameson makes the argument that “the resistance of archaic feudal structures to irresistible modernizing tendencies…is the condition of possibility fo...
Keywords: modernism, combined and uneven development, periphery, world literature
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
South Asian Modernism and the Fragment
Organizers: Mantra Mukim
This seminar examines the fragmentary (khaṇḍ, ṭukṛā, ansh) as an aesthetic and political category in South Asian modernism. While literary modernism has often been associat...
Keywords: fragments, world literature, South Asian Literature, global modernism
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Inter/Nationalist Literary and Visual Cultures
Organizers: Michael Anthony Turcios
What is an inter/nationalist genre and form? How is it defined and visualized? Might we think of “inter/nationalism” as a refusal of “national” recognition in the neoliberal, capitalist order?
Keywords: inter/nationalism, indigenous, world, Visual Culture, film and media, poetry, Global South, sovereignty, Third Space
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Sexual Slavery and Economic Dependency: A Critical Study of the Nachni Performers of Eastern India in the Context of the Devadasi Tradition
Organizers: RAKHI MONDAL, INDRANIL ACHARYA
Despite being legally prohibited, the Devadasi tradition continues to survive in modified forms across several regions of India, revealing the persistence of caste-based, gendered, and economic exp...
Keywords: Devadasi Tradition; Nachni Performers; Sexual Slavery; Economic Dependency; Unfree Labour; Civil Death; Subaltern Studies; Gende
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Critical Mystery Studies: From our distant past and into the present
Organizers: Nahir Otano Gracia, Matthew Goodwin
Critical Mystery Studies (CMS) examines the role of mystery in the long traditions, histories of resistance, and cultural expressions of BIPOC communities, and at the same time, it explores how mys...
Keywords: #critical race studies, #feminist studies, #ethnic studies, #medieval, #contemporary, ghost
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Conditional Hospitality: Imaging Asian Diaspora in Contemporary Iberian and Latin American Cultural Production
Organizers: Paula Park, Dorian Lee Jackson
In Sebastián Borensztein’s film Un cuento chino (2011), Jun, a Chinese migrant stranded in Buenos Aires, played by Taiwanese-Argentine actor Ignacio Huang, is taken in by lo...
Keywords: Latin America, Latin America, Asian diaspora, film and television, visual arts, Iberia
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
'The Best Companion': The Aesthetics of Book Love in Arabic Literature
Organizers: Ali Alnahhabi
Taking its cue from al-Mutanabbī’s celebrated verse, this seminar examines how Arabic literature imagines, narrates, describes, and aesthetically enacts relationships with books. Moving bey...
Keywords: Arabic Literature, Book love / bibliophilia, aesthetics, book history, Manuscript culture
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
In Confidence: Credit, Complicity, and the Company We Keep
Organizers: Stephanie Ng, Carolyn Shapiro
From the Latin con-fidere, “to trust with,” confidence names the founding act of friendship (to confide), the currency of intimacy (a confidence, a secret shared), the swindler who wields ...
Keywords: confidence, belief, credit, complicity, implication, Friendship, trust, betrayal, gossip, Belonging
Date Submitted: July 30, 2026
Formalizing Kinship Otherwise: Care, Belonging, and Collective Life
Organizers: Anwita Ghosh, Joey Hong
Nonnormative and undertheorized practices of bonding, such as polyamory, situationships, open relationships, chosen families, and other fleeting intimacies, have increasingly participated...
Keywords: queer studies, cultural studies, Kinship, gender and sexuality, #global anglophone
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
The 'Bearded Sage Hipster' Tolstoy, the 'spiritual lecturer' Dostoevsky, and the 'Hot Young Chekhov' : what Internet’s meme culture is doing with Russian Writers
Organizers: nina straus
Proposal for a panel on A recent onslaught of polemics regarding Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, among other Slavic writers, is now riding the Internet. ...
Keywords: Internet Tolstoy Dostoevsky Chekhov politics
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Black Study, in Comparison
Organizers: Matthew Molinaro
“The Negro is comparison,” writes Frantz Fanon in his searing psychopolitical excavation of blackness, whiteness, and the human in Black Skin, White Masks. Taking comparison...
Keywords: black studies, gender and sexuality, Comparative literary studies, social movements, aesthetics
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Speculative Fiction and Unbelonging
Organizers: Emily Maguire, Marcela Di Blasi
In Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, Darieck Scott distinguishes between two different kinds of fantasy: “collective fantasies,” those communally held belie...
Keywords: speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, Unbelonging, genre studies, Afrofuturism
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Voices without Persons
Organizers: Elisha Cohn, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska
What is voice without personhood? Voice typically suggests a person speaking, or, perhaps, a disembodied imitation of human speech, or a non-human entity that is anthropomorphized through the very ...
Keywords: narrative theory, narratology, theory of the novel, free indirect style, form, formalism, lyric, person, impersonality
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Cursed Celebrity: Fame and Infamy in the Americas
Organizers: Jesse Rothbard, Alessandra [email protected]
If American mass media is an ecosystem, we cast the press as predators, and the celebrity as their prey. We envision the reporters grouped in a posse, arranged for an ambush. Camera flash...
Keywords: celebrity, true crime, popular culture, mass media, historical violence
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
The Cliché in Contemporary Culture
Organizers: Hannah Kwak
What is the place of clichés in contemporary culture? In the age of predictive language models like Claude and ChatGPT, language has become more formulaic than ever, suggesting a need to ...
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Media and Technology, cultural studies, cognitive literary studies
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
(Re-)Theorizing Capital from the Global South: Humanity after Financialisation
Organizers: Susanna Sacks, Kyle Wanberg
How does financialization shift our relationship to the future? And what new insights emerge when we decenter northern approaches in our analysis?Since the end of the Bre...
Keywords: literature and economics, economics of culture, Global South, postcolonial literature, literary theory
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Who Appears After Translation? Authors, Artists, and Transcultural Personas
Organizers: Song Huang
In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li writes about the deaths of her two sons in a language of striking restraint. Her movement between English-language literary writing and Chinese-la...
Keywords: transnational literature, multilingualism
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Ecological Emergency and Reimagining of the Anthropocene
Organizers: Yishu Wu
Emergency is commonly perceived as a state of volatility that forces urgent and time-sensitive actions, such as earthquakes, military coups, famines, or pandemics that disrupt normal life. At the s...
Keywords: ecology, Anthropocene, Emergency, climate, crisis, Disaster, Catastrophe, apocalypse
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Law Desire
Organizers: Georgios Evgenios Douliakas, Lindsay Stern
Desires make and unmake us, and laws do so too. But law has often been understood as the domain of reason, devoid of feeling and affect. This seminar brings these two spheres together, in...
Keywords: law, desire, justice, autonomy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, Critical Legal Theory, comparative literature
Date Submitted: July 29, 2026
Borrowing, Stealing, Reclaiming: Appropriation as Resistance
Organizers: Maximilian Gindorf
Appropriation is an undertheorized concept, despite its long and complex history. Contemporary struggles over data theft, land dispossession, cultural appropriation, or economic exploitation unders...
Keywords: private property, #marxism, cultural appropriation, comparative literature, #resistance
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Visualizing War in Latin America
Organizers: Sebastian Diaz-Martinez, Jerónimo Sepúlveda
War has always been a problem of visuality. From colonial cartography and religious iconography to satellite images, drones, and algorithmic warfare, each historical transformation of war...
Keywords: Visual Culture, culture wars, Latin America, Warfare and Visuality, Visual Regiomes
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Marxism, Materialism, and Materialist Critique
Organizers: Justin Rogers-Cooper, Peter Hitchcock
Whither Marxist and historical materialisms after the moment of the “new”? It has now been 15 years since Diana Coole and Samantha Frost published New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politi...
Keywords: Marxism, materialism, materialisms, historical materialism, Marxist approaches to literature
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Capitalism and Sexual Dissidence
Organizers: Amy De'Ath, Rosemary Hennessy
This seminar seeks to connect two recent parallel developments in trans studies and contemporary Marxism, both of which offer new ways of conceptualizing the processual dimensions of our social wor...
Keywords: Marxism, trans studies, Feminist and Queer Theory, Sexual Difference, aesthetic theory
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Gender-Situated Crime Fiction
Organizers: Nicole Kenley, Patrick Deer
Crime fiction scholarship has a strong tradition of work that examines the contributions of authors who utilize the form of crime fiction to promote gender equality. This tradition of writing, and ...
Keywords: Crime fiction, Gender Justice, Global context, systemic injustice, Patriarchy, decolonial feminism
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Eruptive Temporalities: From Aesthetic to Political Revolution
Organizers: Javier Padilla
Literary modernity has often been described as an aesthetic revolutionary event. From Joycean epiphany and Poundian poetics, to more theoretical concepts, like Walter Benjamin’s now-time (Jetzs...
Keywords: revolutionary aesthetics, Temporality, global modernity, liberation, decoloniality
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Ecologizing Postcolonial Studies
Organizers: Amanda Vredenburgh
After a period of remarkable growth in the past fifteen years, postcolonial ecocriticism is firmly established in Anglophone, Hispanophone, Lusophone, and more recently, Francophone Studies. In fou...
Keywords: ecocriticism, environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, decolonial studies
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Thinking in Images: Visualization, Imagination, and Empathy in Reading
Organizers: Sasha McDowell
Visualization and imagination have long been recognized as vital to the act of reading. While Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky may have denounced the maxim "Art is thinking in images" i...
Keywords: imagination, empathy, affect theory, phenomenology, Reader-response, cognition
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Living On, After All
Organizers: Michael Krimper, John Ricco
How to take up the question of living and dying, and what it means to survive, to live on, after the countless disasters of modernity? In reading Blanchot’s fiction, Derrida unfolds ...
Keywords: deconstruction, Critical Theory, biopolitics, ecocriticism, queer theory, black studies, indigeneity, survival, trauma, Disaster
Date Submitted: July 28, 2026
Feminized/Minoritized Bodies, Displacement, and ‘World’ Cinema
Organizers: Pragya Trivedi
While mainstream cinema may be called a resolution-oriented cinema, ‘world’ cinema often emphasizes displacement, particularly for feminized/minoritized bodies, and in many i...
Keywords: world cinema, #feminist studies, Global South
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
'The Sins of Reading (Peccata Lectionis),' a Seminar Sponsored by the ICLA Research Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature
Organizers: Marton Hoványi
Papers with a specifically comparative focus on the sins of reading (Peccata Lectionis) can examine the topic of the seminar from a theoretical, methodological and thematic perspective. If we speak...
Keywords: ethics of reading, literary theory, reading, sin
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
Character on the Brink
Organizers: Soumya Shailendra, Anushka Sen
In an interview with The New Yorker, Rachel Cusk predicted: “I don’t think characters exist anymore”. Cusk’s jarring prognosis illuminates a range of recent innovations in t...
Keywords: Literary Character, novel, contemporary literature, Global Novel, formalism (1120, nonhuman
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
Troubled Spaces
Organizers: Srisha Shen, Abigail Mengesha
Against the fantasy of space as a neutral setting around which history unfolds, Katherine McKittrick argues that “Geography’s discursive attachment to stasis and physicality, the idea ...
Keywords: Spatiality, transnationalism, relationality, public/private, intersectionality, cartography, otherness, intimacy
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
Sacrifice, Loss, Sharing
Organizers: James Bliss, Sarah Richter
Late capitalism has told us that the era of sacrifice has ended—at least for the capitalist. That subject believes in giving up nothing, as overlapping crises of overproduction have been ...
Keywords: anarchism, black studies, deconstruction, #WalterBenjamin, racial capitalism, decoloniality
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
How Should One Read a Book?: (Un)common Readers and Reading Practices in Modernisms
Organizers: Dipanjan Maitra, Minjung Ha
How do we study reading practices of the modernist era? After the development of what Richard Altick (1957) famously called the “democracy of print” in the nineteenth century, and the mov...
Keywords: readers, close reading, distant reading, speed reading, institutions and institutionalized reading practices
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
Methods and Theories for Body Concepts and Cultural Hybridity
Organizers: Nicholas Johnson
The body has served as a site of cultural negotiation throughout local epistemic changes. Whether contending between critical disability and health humanist phenomenological analyses of health and ...
Keywords: Global Health Humanities, Disability Studies, artistic forms, cultural hybridity, Body studies
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
What About Wonder?
Organizers: Anne Marie Thompson, Helena Tomko
This seminar is about wonder. Specifically, we want to explore how wonder might enliven and invigorate our profession in a time of many pressures, if not crises, in higher education. Why wonder? Fr...
Keywords: wonder, pedagogy, methodology, aesthetics, philosophy and literature, religion and literature
Date Submitted: July 27, 2026
Fluid Monuments: Literary Rivers as Sites of Memory
Organizers: David Porter
This seminar asks how literature participates in the making of rivers as collective memory sites and heritage landscapes. Rivers have long organized literary form and historical consciousness: they...
Keywords: literary place-making, travelling memory, Literary geography, spatial humanities, blue humanities
Date Submitted: July 26, 2026
Becoming Monster: Representation and Rights
Organizers: Fatma Betül Çiftçi, Julia Chan
One is not born a monster; the monster is produced. From Beowulf to Ruthven to Dracula to cyborgs, ‘monster’ is a cultural construction, a humanly-produced non-human. This se...
Keywords: Monster; Human Rights; Body, Otherness; Horror and Science Fiction; Gothic Literature.
Date Submitted: July 25, 2026
Poetry in the Shadows: Socialist Noir and Aesthetic Freedom in 1980s Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China
Organizers: Lucian Țion
The 1980s represent a critical, yet highly under-researched decade in film studies. Frequently obscured by the towering grandeur of earlier revolutionary eras or the subsequent post-socialist New W...
Keywords: socialism, noir, communism, Eastern Bloc, China, new wave cinema
Date Submitted: July 25, 2026
The Making of Visibility: Representation Across Texts, Images, and Interfaces
Organizers: Dany Jacob
Across cultures and historical periods, texts, images, and other representational forms have done more than depict the world: they have shaped the conditions under which people, identities, communi...
Keywords: visibility, representation, aesthetics, comparative media, Cultural Formation, interfaces, materiality
Date Submitted: July 24, 2026
Thinking Stupidity: Literature, Philosophy, and Critical Theory
Organizers: John Bolin, Patrick Hayes
This seminar explores stupidity as a literary and philosophical problem, alongside related concepts including ignorance, idiocy, folly, non-knowledge, and other forms of epistemic failure.Fr...
Keywords: Stupidity; Ignorance; Idiocy; Non-Knowledge; Critical Theory; Literary Theory; Philosophy; Comparative Literature; Epistemology;
Date Submitted: July 24, 2026
Queer Kayfabe
Organizers: Chase Gregory
This seminar seeks to read the concept of “kayfabe” alongside extant concepts in queer theory and criticism. The word “kayfabe” is quite young by linguists’ standards, and bears unclear e...
Keywords: #queer, Feminist and Queer Theory, Gender & Representation, cultural studies
Date Submitted: July 23, 2026
Poetry as Ethical Witness: Literature, Trauma, and Political Violence
Organizers: Sarah Ewida
This seminar examines how poetry creates forms of witnessing that engage with experiences of political violence beyond the limits of factual representation. Drawing on Shoshana Felman and...
Keywords: Poetry & Poetics, Trauma Studies, Human Rights & Literature, Twentieth Century and Beyond, comparative poetics
Date Submitted: July 23, 2026
Digital Visibility: Resistance, Marginalization and Platform Power
Organizers: Atousa Kaviani
In the present digital era, the public sphere, as defined by Jürgen Habermas—a space where citizens negotiate power through collective discussion and political participation—has shifted o...
Keywords: Digital Studies, digital media, Comparative Media Studies, digital humanities, media studies, Comparative Literature and Area Studies, comparative literature
Date Submitted: July 22, 2026
The Family in Post-Socialist Chinese Cinema
Organizers: Lily Li
The 1990s witnessed internationally the end of Cold War, the Internet boom, rapid globalization, and drastic socio-economic transformation towards Westernization in China, which have resulted in mu...
Keywords: Chinese cinema and literature, 1990s to the present, post-socialist China, family
Date Submitted: July 22, 2026
War’s Afterlives: Trauma, Memory and Cultural Production across South Asia and the Middle East
Organizers: Neha Soman, Sarathkumar S R
War does not end; it migrates even after the guns fall silent, crawling into bodies, landscapes, archives, and the grammar of storytelling itself. This seminar inquires into how societies of South ...
Keywords: War and Conflict, trauma, memory studies, South Asia, MIddle East, literature, cinema, archives, memorials, graphic narrative
Date Submitted: July 22, 2026
Earth, Vibrations, and Literature
Organizers: Morten Hansen
In a 1970s interview, the artist and writer Robert Smithson attempted to explain the philosophy behind his mixed-media works of art incorporating rocks, debris, photos, and landscapes: “If you pile...
Keywords: #media, sound studies, geology, geocriticism, interdisciplinarity, vibrations, global
Date Submitted: July 21, 2026
Transnational Radio Drama and Narrative Podcasts
Organizers: Caroline Kita, Pim Verhulst
Radio dramas, that is, dramatic works staged to be broadcast on the radio, have long been marginalized in literary studies. Although in many cultural traditions the format attracted writers of “ser...
Keywords: radio, radio drama, podcasts, sound studies, adaptation, translation, transnational literature
Date Submitted: July 21, 2026
Misunderstandings
Organizers: Jan Mieszkowski, Dominik Zechner
This seminar invites participants to identify a consequential misunderstanding in literary studies, critical theory, or philosophy and to explain what has gone wrong, what is at stake in correcting...
Keywords: intellectual history, Critical Theory, Philology, hermeneutics, interpretation, reading
Date Submitted: July 20, 2026
Rethinking Literary Address
Organizers: Aliya Ram
Can language address its others without apostrophe or the vocative? Of course (it just did). But if address is not tied to specific linguistic markers, how do we know it’s there? How do we discuss ...
Keywords: Critical Theory, linguistics, black radical tradition, lyric, psychoanalysis, rhetoric
Date Submitted: July 20, 2026
Afro-Indigenous Imaginary, Frame, Corpus: Anticolonial Approaches
Organizers: Jose Carlos Diaz Zanelli, Vialcary Crisostomo
This panel centers Afro-Indigenous hemispheric connections across the Americas, framing them not as separate tracks but as deeply intertwined lineages of resistance and thought. Moving be...
Keywords: Abiayala, Afro-Caribbean, Latin American literature, Anti-colonialism, indigeneity
Date Submitted: July 19, 2026
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, Paul North
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
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, John Lysaker
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, Patrick Dove
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, Tanya Agathocleous
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