Aftermaths of the 19th Century
Description
The nineteenth century saw the birth of many modern forms of knowledge production, increasingly sorted across the widening gulf between the human or social and the physical sciences (e.g. comparative philology, anthropology, sociology, statistics, psychology — comparative biology, meteorology, geology, ecology, genetics). It also gave rise to the modern shapes of empire under global capitalism, and to early models of anticolonial struggle; to industrial production at scale, and to proletarian solidarity; to extractive capitalism’s fossil dependency, and to nascent flashes of environmental consciousness.
This seminar, however, is not about the nineteenth century, but rather about the world it made. We aim to convene a group of scholars who will think collectively, experimentally, and globally about some of the residues, aftereffects, and transformations of cultural phenomena that followed the nineteenth century, as these are registered in later representational forms and imaginative literatures. What are the leftovers, holdovers, hangovers of nineteenth-century thought and praxis? What translations, transformations, and adaptations did these systems undergo in the process of imperial and colonial spread? Once we isolate these aftermaths, how do they change our view of comparative literary history?
A major aim of the group will necessarily be to reflect on and to reconsider conventional formations of nineteenth-century literary study, particularly as Eurocentric chronologies and analytics have come under scrutiny — whether as fields (e.g. romanticism, Victorian studies, global Anglophone, decadence) or as formal categories (e.g. historical realism, slave narrative, dramatic monologue, case study, genre fiction). In challenging the nineteenth century as a simple span of time, we are at the same time interested in deforming its accepted array of disciplinary and aesthetic assumptions.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Eran Horowitz is a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale's Germanic Studies Department. He recently completed a PhD in Comparative Literature on “Irony and Bildung in Romantic German and French Literature.” His research follows Romanticism, German Modernist Literature, and travel writing to the East.
Speaker Bio
Harris Feinsod is the Ralph S. and Becky G. O’Connor Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (2017) and co-translator of Oliverio Girondo's Decals: Complete Early Poems (2018). He directs the Tidewater Initiative, a multidisciplinary research group studying working waterfronts under conditions of globalization and environmental instability. He chairs the ACLA Publications Committee.
Speaker Bio
Tristram Wolff is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University where he teaches in English, Comp Lit Studies, and Environmental Policy & Culture.
Speaker Bio
Emily Drumsta is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation (University of California Press 2024) and Revolt Against the Sun: Selected Poetry of Nazik al-Malaʾikah, A Bilingual Reader (Saqi 2020). She has published articles in Social Text, Middle Eastern Literatures, Research in African Literatures, and the Journal of World Literature.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Brady Ryan is Assistant Professor of Arabic at University of Connecticut. He researches modern Arabic literature and focuses on the inheritance and development of literary symbols, genres, and modes of critique across historical periods and literary generations. He has published on topics as diverse as gender and politically committed literature, aesthetic critiques of authoritarianism, intergenerational memoirs of Jewish Egyptian Communists, and Sufism in historical novels.
Speaker Bio
Victoria Baena is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she focuses on comparative histories of the novel, Marxist and feminist theories, and translation. Her writing has appeared in ELH, Victorian Literature & Culture, Diacritics, Textual Practice, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and elsewhere, and her essays and translations have also been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Boston Review, and The Yale Review.
Speaker Bio
Vidya Venkatesh is the Thole Research Fellow in English at Trinity Hall College, University of Cambridge. Dr. Venkatesh researches everyday talk in the philosophies, sciences, and literatures of the twentieth century, with particular interests in ordinary language philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the modernist novel of manners. Some of their recent scholarship can be found in New Literary History, Diacritics, and The Cambridge Quarterly.
Speaker Bio
Kylie Sago is currently assistant professor of French at San Diego State University. She holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. Her research on the cultural histories and legacies of the French empire can be found in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and other venues. She is writing a book on literary adaptation and the construction of race, titled Revising Race: Literary Adaptation and the French Empire.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Omar F. Miranda is Associate Professor of English at the University of San Francisco. He is coeditor of Percy Shelley for Our Times (Cambridge UP, 2024), and editor of On the 200th Anniversary of Byron’s Manfred (2019) and the abridged teaching edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (2022). His article “The Global Romantic Lyric” won the Bigger 6 Award (2021). He coedits The New Nineteenth Century series (Bloomsbury) and is at work on a book on Romanticism and celebrity.
Speaker Bio
Agam Balooni is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Northwestern University. He studies gothic literatures of the long nineteenth century, focusing on the gothic as a comparative paradigm across British and South Asian writing, with interests in the global contemporary gothic aftermath.
Speaker Bio
Johannah King-Slutzky is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her work has been published in European Romantic Review and ASLE.
Speaker Bio
Emma Adler is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her book project, Novel Drama, examines plays based on novels that engage with the form of the novel. Her work has appeared in Modern Drama, The Journal of Narrative Theory, and The Gaskell Journal, and is forthcoming in Revenge is Mad Hard: Fat Ham and the Question of Cultural Reclamation. From 2020 to 2022 she was the Fiction Editor of The Drift.