Infrastructure Between World-Making and Nation-Building
Description
The ‘decolonial wave’ that swept over the Global South in the mid-twentieth century left newly independent nations beached on the shores of a dreary Cold War world. New nations required 'nation-building': an amorphous set of interlocking projects concerned with new infrastructure, economic planning, and increased state oversight. Under the rubrics of development, new nation-states became the project and subject of the post-war social sciences. Modernisation theorists proliferated infrastructural and commercial experiments, turning new nations into testing grounds for their theories. The decolonizing world became the developing world; advocates of modernisation theories paved the way – often literally, with poured concrete – for both national prosperity and foreign exploitation.
This seminar invites brief proposals from scholars working on questions of infrastructure in the context of nation-building and world-making, in contexts outside of the North Atlantic world after 1800. Please submit an abstract (250 words max) a brief bio (50 words max) to Daniel Elam ([email protected]) by 30 September.
Schedule
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Speaker Bio
Emily Sun teaches Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard College. Her publications include On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China (2021) and, co-edited with Orrin Wang, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and World Literature (forthcoming 2026).
Speaker Bio
Michael Allan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He also serves as the editor of the journal Comparative Literature.
Speaker Bio
Akshya Saxena is an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
Speaker Bio
Maryam Wasif Khan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at LUMS University, Lahore. Her first book, Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms was published in 2021. She is currently working on a project about the Pakistani serial drama as social history.
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Speaker Bio
Kritish Rajbhandari is Associate Professor of English and Humanities. He is the author of The Indian Ocean and the Historical Imagination in Afro-Asian Fiction, and has translated two books of poetry from Nepalbhasa,
Speaker Bio
Sunayani Bhattacharya is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her scholarship is at the juncture of comparative literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Sound Studies, and she investigates emergent media practices in colonial and postcolonial India.
Speaker Bio
Rosario Hubert is Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Trinity College. Her book Disoriented Disciplines. China Latin America and the Shape of World Literature (2023) was recipient of the ACLA Helen Tartar First book subvention award and was funded by fellowships from NEH and ACLS. She is currently working on a project about poetics of the inhospitable and polar modernity.
Speaker Bio
J Daniel Elam is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (Fordham, 2021).
Papers
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Preeti Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She is a literary and cultural historian of South Asia and is currently working on a monograph on the Cultural Lives of the Indian National Emergency (1975-177). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in South Asian Review, the International Journal of Comic Art, Philosophy and Global Affairs, Global South Studies, and Public Books.
Speaker Bio
Anna Stielau (any/all) is an assistant professor of Art History and Visual Culture at OCAD University in Toronto. They received their PhD from NYU's Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and previously served as Weisman Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles. Their research explores contemporary African art through the lens of media and technology studies, with a particular focus on practices of visual activism.
Speaker Bio
Valeria Seminario is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the relationship between literary form and transportation infrastructure in nineteenth-century Latin America, focusing on how fiction responded to and helped imagine the spatial demands of export capitalism. Her dissertation explores how the unfinished or imagined character of infrastructural development fostered speculative narratives that envisioned new political and territorial orders.