43 seminars found
Attuning to Noise: Other Modalities of Sounding, Listening, and Writing in Literature
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
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 ...
Keywords: bodies, embodiment, bodily expression, body art, bodily practice
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
One Hundred Years of Magical Realism in Literature, Film, and A.I. Simulation
Organizers: Eugene Arva
This comparative-literature seminar proposes tracing the evolution of magical realism in the 21st century, formally, medially, and geographically. Besides the fundamental elements of magical realis...
Keywords: magical realism, critical trauma theory, ecocriticism, simulation, hyperreality, A.I.
Date Submitted: June 15, 2026
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