Ghost Figures in World Literature
Virtual Session
Description
A ghost, Avery Gordon writes, “has a real presence and demands its due, your attention” (2008, Ghostly Matters). To answer this demand, our seminar invites submissions that turn their attention to literary and artistic ghosts. After all, ghosts are profoundly literary figures; like poetics, they are defined by their repetitions and returns, and constantly referring to something else, though failing to fully represent it. However, ghosts are not any literary figures. They are haunting, and although they have a strong presence they come into life in place of something absent. Moreover, in their haunting presence, they are signalling “repressed or unresolved social violence” (Gordon, 2008).
However, the question that is raised here is: what is lost, and what is haunting through the figure of the ghost? We aim to figure this out by raising more questions like: Is it lost pasts, or rather, as Mark Fisher (2014, Ghosts of My Life) argues, lost futures that always already affect our present? Is it the absent people, their memories, or memories about them?
Leading with such questions, our seminar is open to broad interpretations and understandings of ghosts and their actions. Nevertheless, we highly prefer inquiries that not only stem from the perspective that ghosts have “a real presence” but also “that they produce material effects” and even have social and political agencies (Gordon, 2008). For example, such as in Sanabel Abdelrahman’s investigation into Palestinian magical realism, where “[g]hosts repeatedly appear […] not as passive byproducts of Israel’s settler-colonialism but as active agents of their own and their people’s liberation” (2023, “Approaches to Palestinian Liberation”). Hence, we ask not only what and whose absence they replace, but also who and why they haunt and how they act.
Furthermore, the seminar invites comparative approaches that look beyond the figure and term “ghost” to different forms of spirits, such as the critical difference of djinns that Shir Alon offers (2018, “Djinn Stories”), for example.
If so, we seek comparative, radical, critical, and acute explorations of ghosts’ appearances and poetics in all aspects of cultural production and g-local figurations, aiming at giving ghosts (and the living) the attention they demand. These explorations can be along the following lines, but not limited to:
Haunting temporalities: ghosts of lost pasts and futures
Specters as alternative realities
Ghost stories and oppression
Ghosts and resistance
Literary ghosts and ghosts as literary figurations
Ghostly poetics
Different ghost figures in World Literature
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Shabana Sayeed (she/ her) is a lecturer at the Department of English and Media Studies at Bentley University. She teaches general and labs courses of rhetoric, composition, and writing. She received her doctoral degree in Literary Studies from the Department of English, Georgia State University. Her research focuses on the cross-disciplinary intersections between postcolonial trauma literature and history with a focus on Indian Dalit and pan-African black women, refugee women, and drag performances in social media and media. Her secondary research engages in ethnic, religious, and cultural representations in transnational digital pedagogy and Artificial Intelligence. Several of her articles and manuscripts including a book translation (from Bengali to English) are under review and under preparation for publication. Her pedagogy advocates working with ESL, international, and non-native English speakers.
Speaker Bio
Maysoon Shibi holds a PhD in Palestinian folk literature from the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies in Tel Aviv University (2021).
She is currently a postdoctoral fellow of the Minerva Stiftung at the Freie Universität Berlin's Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies. Her current research concerns poetic meter ('Arud) in Arab women’s poetry in the modern times. It is a continuation of her Masters' thesis, "Al-rajaz Meter in Modern Arabic Poetry".
Speaker Bio
Çiğdem Buğdaycı (Ph.D.) received her B.A. in Western Languages and Literatures from Boğaziçi University and her M.A. in Cultural Studies from Istanbul Bilgi University. She completed her Ph.D. at ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis), University of Amsterdam, where her dissertation focused on the changing significations of the concept of love in relation to secularism and the modernization of Turkey. Currently, she teaches part-time in Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University, focusing on love in literature.
Speaker Bio
Shahrukh Khan is a doctoral student at The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. He has qualified for Assistant Professorship and been awarded the Junior Research Fellowship from UGC. He has completed his M.Phil. in “The Metaphor of Home in Sea Fiction: A Critique of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea” from Mahatma Gandhi Central University, India. He was awarded the Gold Medal in M.A. English from Aliah University, Kolkata. He has been published in the Lincom Press, Germany. His research interests include blue humanities, oceanic/sea/river literature, and blue ecocriticism.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Learned Foote is a visiting assistant professor at Lawrence University, where he teaches courses on Buddhism, religious studies, and gender studies. In 2023, he received his Ph.D. from Rice University, with a dissertation focusing on the Tibetan life writings of Adzom Drukpa (1842-1924). His research has been published in the Palgrave MacMillan volume Queer Kinship and Comparative Literature: New Approaches and is forthcoming in the Duke University Press journal QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion.
Speaker Bio
Ido Fuchs is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. He holds a master’s degree in Literature and is a graduate of the Program for Judeo-Arabic Cultural Studies. His doctoral dissertation is a study of different articulations of return in Palestinian literature, focusing on questions of gender, anti/post-colonialism, and world literature. Fuchs is a co-founder of the Arabic-Hebrew Lexicon project at the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University and a co-author of the Lexicon’s award-winning article بلد בלד (Balad). His research was published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Praktyka Teoretyczna, Mafteakh, and Bezalel. Additionally, Fuchs is a member of CounterText’s early career researchers’ editorial board and an associated EUME doctoral Fellow for the academic year 2024/2025 at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Speaker Bio
Kristin Perkins is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University in the Theatre and Performance program where she studies the intersection of religion and theatre in the United States during the 20th century, particularly the performance culture of the emergent evangelical right-wing. Her scholarship has been published in Theatre Topics and Ecumenica. She has also written for American Theatre Magazine, Howlround, and Publisher’s Weekly.
Speaker Bio
Soonyoung Lee is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard College and earned her PhD from University of California, Riverside in 2023. In her research and teaching, she explores the politics of representation in South Korean literature and films, as well as the Cold War’s influence on popular culture. Her work draws from literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies. She is currently writing her first book, which delves into the ideals and themes that shaped South Korean youth culture during the 1960s and 1970s.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Paula Pérez-Rodríguez is a Postdoctoral “Marcel Bataillon” Fellow in the Madrid Institute for Advances Studies (2024-2025) and Casa de Velázquez, a French academic and cultural institution in Spain. She was a Research Fellow at Fundación Banco Sabadell-Hangar during 2024 (ending October 2024) and received her Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2023. She also holds an MA from the University of Alcalá (Cultural Studies) and a BA from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her research explores the technological and cultural order of verbal and textual arts and radical and collective creative practices, touching on areas like Cultural History, Literary Theory, Book History, popular and vernacular cultures and the intersection of literacy, media, writing and the arts. She has taught courses about rap and poetry, book history and sound studies, has lectured in different international settings, and has participated in different Public Humanities projects in Spain (Matadero-Madrid, Santa Mònica Museum, La Capella, La Madraza, CSIC or Matadero-Madrid). Their current book manuscript, VERBOEXORBITANCIAS. El paso de la literatura a las artes verbales en España, 1909-1936, analyzes the passage from the imaginations and operations of literature to the contemporary state of “verbal arts.” They collaborate with the EDI-RED digital portal, the research groups THECO (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and GICELAH (Spanish National Research Council) the research project Cartografías vitales (Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology - Spanish National Research Council).
Speaker Bio
Diego Baena received his PhD. from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University in 2020. He also holds an MA from Princeton and a BA in History and Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago. His doctoral dissertation (La literatura y sus pueblos) explores the intersection between popular literacy, various forms of popular media, censorship, and dissident political cultures in nineteenth-century Spain. While one part of Dr. Baena’s research has focused on representations of urban and transatlantic migration and working-class caring economies in the works of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Rosalía de Castro, his more recent interests include: the commemoration of republican and socialist political cultures over time; the history of Spanish feminisms; the relationship between Cuban, Spanish, and Puerto Rican republicanism and the international abolitionist movement; representations of class, race, and revolution in the Spanish-speaking Avant-Garde (with special focus on the works of Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, and Luis Buñuel).
Speaker Bio
Dr. Arslan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University and will soon be the co-editor-in-chief of Middle Eastern Literatures. His publications on Mediterranean literatures have appeared in Journal of Mediterranean Studies (2019); Sea of Literatures: Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature (2023); and Utopian Studies (2024). He is working on his second book project entitled Becoming Mediterranean: The Sea Reconfigured in Arabic, French, and Turkish Literatures.
Speaker Bio
Luis-Fernando Restrepo is a university professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and former director of the Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies Program at the University of Arkansas. His areas of expertise are the colonial Latin American epic and literature and human rights. He has five books and editions published and more than 50 articles and chapters. He has been visiting professor at U Antioquia, Javeriana (with a Fulbright), Atlantico, Buenos Aires and Eafit.
Speaker Bio
Nicole Dib is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Utah University. She specializes in contemporary American literature, comparative ethnic approaches to literary studies, road-trip narratives, and comics studies. Her scholarly work appears in venues including MELUS, Studies in the Novel, INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics, and The Routledge Companion to Critical Masculinity Studies. Her current book project examines road-trip narratives by multiethnic American writers who use the genre to critique state-sanctioned immobilizations.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Roni Henig is an Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at NYU. Her first book, On Revival: Hebrew Literature between Life and Death (UPenn press, 2024), is a critique of the discourse of language revival in modern Hebrew literature and Zionist thinking. She is currently working on a project titled Language Monstrosity, revisiting literary texts that engage monstrous bodies as figures of language. Her work was awarded the ACLA Aldridge Prize and the Columbia University Baron prize.
Speaker Bio
I am an associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida. My book, The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton, examines the social dynamics of poems that employ various forms of marginalized local speech. I have published essays on various aspects of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Comparatist, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, and The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose. I have chapters forthcoming in MLA Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of Robert Frost and Teaching Poetry Now.
Speaker Bio
Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay obtained his PhD in Performance Studies at NYU. He is an Associate Professor of Performing Arts at the University of Milan, where he serves as the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Performance and Politics. Ertuğ’s research areas include minoritarian performance cultures, critical archival studies, and the cultural history of Turkey. He has co-edited special issues for Comparative Drama, Archives and Records, and The Journal of Popular Culture.
Speaker Bio
Thomas Dayzie is a graduate student in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he is working on a novel. He completed his BA at Princeton University with a concentration in English and certificates in Creative Writing and Humanistic Studies. His interests include Critical Theory, Film, and Literatures in English, Hebrew, and German. His latest publication is an essay for IAIA’s Chapter House on the director Maya Deren’s theoretical writings.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Sarah Zahed is an Assistant Professor of Global and Postcolonial Literature, specializing in nationalism studies and its relation to British and Imperial political thought in 20th and 21st-century South Asian and Middle Eastern literature. Dr. Zahed earned her Ph.D. in English from State University of New York, University at Albany and is currently working on a book project centered on Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s exploration of self-determination and imagined future communities.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Shurouq Ibrahim is a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Comparative Studies and has completed a graduate minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). Shurouq is currently the Graduate Research Associate for the Center for the Study of Religion and an instructor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. Shurouq’s research interrogates individual, vicarious, and cultural trauma in modern and contemporary fiction. Her dissertation project examines the intersections between cultural trauma, gendered subjectivity, and the spiritual-supernatural in modern Arabic and Anglo Arab literature and film. Shurouq is particularly interested in gothic tropes such as the qarina/spirit-double, the monstrous feminine, haunting, and embodied abjection.
Speaker Bio
Ram Bashan is an M.A student in TAU, a public humanities activist and an alum of the
Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students. Ram is writing his master’s
thesis on W.G. Sebald’s literature, focusing on his melancholic poetics as means for bearing
witness and for articulating unfulfilled desires, often connected to the destructive nature of
history. Ram runs a public library and a cultural center in Tel Aviv, initiating multi-lingual
projects for the benefit of the community.
Speaker Bio
Madhurima Sen is a final-year DPhil candidate at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Her doctoral research, titled The Unquiet Front: Bangladesh War Literature and its Discontents, interrogates the Bangladeshi discourse of martyrdom and nationalism and highlights the uncomfortable silences in the official war narrative. Her work has been published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies and Southeast Asian Review of English, and she has contributed articles to The Daily Star, a leading English-language newspaper in Bangladesh.
Speaker Bio
Aureo Lustosa Guerios is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Padua, in Italy. His research is comparative in nature and it looks into the interaction of literature, epidemiology and the history of epidemic diseases. His PhD thesis deals with epidemic cholera and its literary imagination in Europe, from 1830 to 1930. Aureo's research interests encompass the Health and Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism and Comparative Literature.