Modernism Otherwise: Global Modernisms Across Asia and Beyond
Description
As the globalization of modernist studies continues to generate new axes of comparison and fresh perspectives on the multiple temporalities of literary modernity, transnational histories of global modernisms have drawn increasing attention. In response, projects such as NONWESTLIT have opened new directions for rethinking modernism through its global and multifaceted interconnections, moving beyond the canonical boundaries of the Global North. Building on this impetus, this seminar aims to foster dialogue on the intersections of modernist aesthetics across diverse non-Western literary and cultural traditions.
Challenging the tendency to conceptualize non-Western modernisms as derivative, we seek to foreground the polycentric emergence of modernisms across Asia and other cultural spaces beyond the Global North, where writers, artists, critics, and translators engaged with modernism through innovation, translation, and adaptation, navigating rapid political, linguistic, and cultural transformations.
The seminar intends to stimulate comparative approaches to modernisms and literary modernities across Asian and other non-Western cultural spaces (including, but not limited to, Turkish, Persian, Arab, Russian, East Asian, South and Southeast Asian, as well as African, and Latin American traditions) debating issues such as the role of intermediality and intertextuality in shaping modernist aesthetics, the circulation of material and intellectual networks (books, periodicals, visual and performative arts), and the philosophies of time and layered temporalities that define experiences of modernization.
We invite proposals that examine literary modernism from a global perspective, centering on Asia and other non-Western cultural spaces and challenging Eurocentric narratives across literature, visual art, architecture, music, and beyond.
For further inquiries, please contact Enver A. Akova ([email protected]) and Luo Jia ([email protected]).
Schedule
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Speaker Bio
Özen Nergis Dolcerocca is an Associate Professor at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bologna. She is the recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) Grant for her project “Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities.” She is the author of Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time: Bergson, Tanpinar, Benjamin, Walser (2023).
Speaker Bio
Yihan Xie is an M.A. student in Regional Studies–East Asia at Harvard University. Her research examines Sinophone, Malay and Anglophone literary productions and cultural exchanges across the Malay Archipelago and East Asia, with interests in comparative modernisms, Cold War cultural politics, and film and media. She has presented at AAS, AAS-in-Asia, PAMLA, etc., and translates Indonesian short stories into Chinese.
Speaker Bio
Enver A. Akova is a PhD student in Comparative Literature and Classics (Minor) at Stanford University. Focusing on the intersections of politics and poetics, his research concentrates on classical reception in the Late Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and Greece, as well as the politics of form in classical Athens.
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Maziyar Faridi is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Clemson University. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, his under-review monograph, Rhythms of Relation: The Untranslatables of Persian Modernism, stages a critical encounter with a constellation of Persian modernist terms that unsettle modernity's hegemonic rhythms of subjectivity.
Speaker Bio
Maryam Athari is an inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane Global Humanities Center. She earned her PhD in 2024 from Northwestern University and was previously an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Pennsylvania's Wolf Humanities Center. An art historian of twentieth-century global modernisms, she focuses on Middle Eastern and Iranian modern art, with an emphasis on transregional and transmedial exchanges.
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C. Ceyhun Arslan is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Koç University, Istanbul, and the co-editor-in-chief of Middle Eastern Literatures. Arslan is the author of the monograph The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures (EUP). He will soon submit his second book, tentatively entitled Thinking with Worlds: Literatures alongside the Mediterranean, for peer review for a world literature series.
Speaker Bio
Demet Karabulut Dede is an Asst. Prof. in the English Department at Istanbul Bilgi University. She has previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the University of Exeter. She is currently completing two book projects: an edited collection examining the reception of Virginia Woolf in Turkey, and the other exploring representations of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires within a diverse spectrum of modernist texts. She is the founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey
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Sarah María Medina Pérez is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, focusing on avant-garde poetry, ecofeminism, queer theory, and translation theory. Her research explores the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and ecology in Latin American avant-garde poetics. She has published translations and writing in Poetry Magazine, Asymptote, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology.
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Speaker Bio
Sebastian Díaz-Martínez is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He holds an M.Phil. and a B.A. from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. He has taught at FIT–SUNY, CUNY Baruch, CUNY City College, and Fordham University. His work appears in Latin American Research Review, PALARA, Recial, and Asia/América Latina. His dissertation explores Japanese imperial ideology and its impact on Latin American cultural production.
Speaker Bio
Ray Zhou is a Postgraduate Teaching Fellow in the Discipline of English and Writing at the University of Sydney, where he completed his PhD thesis, Global Modernism Reconsidered: W. Somerset Maugham’s Journey to the East in 2025.
Dongyang Li is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. He has a chapter, “Late-Qing China and the Maritime Imagination” (2025), in a Brill book series, Entangled Waterscapes in Asia.
Speaker Bio
Daniel Dufournaud is an assistant professor at the University of Macau. His work is published or forthcoming in such journals as Poetics Today, Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in the Novel, and College Literature. His first monograph, Failure and Ethics in Contemporary American Literature, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press
Speaker Bio
Sylvanna Baugh is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation provides a framework for understanding the formal qualities of African modernism, from the novels of Wole Soyinka to Bessie Head. She is interested in the things that modernism can do that realism cannot, and how modernism captures the affective experience of colonization. She is co-editing a forthcoming special issue of ARIEL on ambivalent realisms in African and Black diasporic writing.