Global Modernism and the Global Philosophy of Mind
Virtual Session
Description
This seminar convenes scholars working in philosophy and literature, broadly construed. It harnesses the frisson between global modernist literature and global philosophies of mind. Seemingly remote from reality, how might the philosophy of mind illuminate the modern global metropolis? Do idealist theories of reality—German, French, or Indian—have a place in accounts of modernity that are so often dominated by Marxian materialism? How might philosophy reconcile, or extricate us from, the impasse between singular and multiple theories of modernity? How does non-European philosophy complicate our extant understanding of this concept?
Papers may consult any number of theorists of modernism and modernity, from Susan Stanford Friedman to Rita Felski, Marshall Berman to Harry Harootunian, and Fredric Jameson to Dipesh Chakrabarty. Participants are also encouraged to engage with the work of global philosophers, including Jonardon Ganeri, Evan Thompson, Jay Garfield, Martha Nussbaum, Alia al-Saji, and Kojin Karatani. Papers should bring a theoretical or philosophical approach to literature from the ever-widening canon of global modernism, potentially drawing on authors such as Rabindranath Tagore, Andrei Bely, Forough Farrokhzad, Sadeq Hedayat, Clarice Lispector, Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Tayeb Salih, Adunis, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Rubén Darío, Octavio Paz, or other less-studied modernist figures.
Papers on non-European modernism and philosophy are especially welcome, in addition to those that expressly theorize the encounter between Europe and the Global South. In this way, the seminar addresses the question of cross-cultural comparison. How can we account for European interest in the non-European world, beyond the framework of orientalism? How can we go beyond paradigms of centers and peripheries, originals and copies, in a way that does not merely restate postcolonial theories of hybridity and creolization? How can we rethink non-European appropriations of European culture without lapsing into frameworks of belatedness and imitation—or do materialist accounts of modernity require that we accept the reality of uneven development?
Contact the organizer with any questions at [email protected]
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Prashant Mishra is Assistant Professor at JK Lakshmipat University, Jaipur. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, and holds a Master's degree in English and American Literature from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. His diverse research interests span Buddhist studies, eroticism, Latin American literature, modern fiction and poetry, mysticism, and phenomenology.
Speaker Bio
Lingchen Huang is a PhD student in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on modern Brazilian literature, critical theory and literary modernism and she is currently working on the nonhuman phenomena in Clarice Lispector’s writing, with an emphasis on the early novels.
Speaker Bio
Sebastián Andrés Grandas is a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at Yale University. His current research engages Latine and Latin American artists concerned with issues of memory, mourning, language, race, sexuality, philosophy, and religion. He is particularly interested in translingual literature, creative self-translation, and “cannibalistic” literary-philosophical styles. Sebastián is a graduate of Middlebury College and formerly taught literature and history in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Speaker Bio
G. Tarun is an autodidact, currently pursuing an MA at IIT Madras. Rooted in global philosophy, Tarun’s research interests span Leo Strauss and the theological-political problem, Fernando Pessoa, AI, ecological thought, classical Indian aesthetics, epistemology, and global philosophy of mind. Tarun has given invited lectures at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, and at the seminar Fernando Pessoa: A Poet’s Creed, hosted by the Universities of Toronto and Goa.
Speaker Bio
Shaj Mathew is Assistant Professor at Trinity University. His first book, The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His scholarship appears in PMLA, MLQ, Modernism/modernity, Philosophy and Literature, the ACLA State of the Discipline Report, and New Literary History.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Speaker Bio
Bowen Wang, an Assistant Professor in English Department at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with his PhD in English and MSc in Literature & Modernity from Trinity College Dublin and Edinburgh. His research interests span across Anglo-American modernism, intermediality between literature and visual art, experimental poetics, and the avant-gardes in the twentieth century. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in journals or edited collections such as Modernist Cultures, Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Literary Studies, The Modernist Review, Bloomsbury’s American Modernism (Re)considered, and Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, among others.
Speaker Bio
Jacob Sponga researches literary sociology, as well as transatlantic modernisms with a focus on ecopoetics and esotericism. His current project charts the rise and ruses of the "reading guidebook" in the 20th century. He is a frequent contributor to The Cantos Project, a research initiative at the University of Edinburgh dedicated to digitizing Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. In his free time, Jacob likes to garden.
Speaker Bio
My name is Dr. Maria Lupak, PhD in Ukrainian Literature (2020) and I am a research fellow of the British Academy, born on the 20th of April, 1993, Ukraine. Graduated from the Faculty of Philology at the Ivan Franko Drohobych State Pedagogical University (2015). Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, I have been living in Cambridge, UK, with my two children from May 2023. My areas of academic interest include XXth-century Ukrainian literature, literary criticism, Kostenko studies, Shevchenko studies, expression of the national idea in Ukrainian fiction, and European contexts of Ukrainian literature.
Speaker Bio
A. Wilson, as of December 2024, holds a Bachelor Degree of Arts in English from Trinity University, San Antonio. Their interests include competitive debate, film, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.