Unresolved Feeling, Fragments of Belonging: Emotion Across Text and Screen
Description
This seminar investigates how repression, repetition, and unresolved rhythms shape emotional experience across Anglophone literature, heritage film, and contemporary media. It emphasizes stalled movements of feeling, looping tensions, and residues that resist closure. Such affective patterns disrupt inherited memories and unsettle formations of Englishness and other post-imperial identities. At the center of this seminar lies a guiding question: how do patterns of emotion simultaneously sustain and fracture collective identity?
The seminar invites papers that examine how emotion circulates through narrative and visual form. Modernist fiction may sustain a flattened tone, heritage television often builds ceremonial rhythm, and streaming platforms organize mood through algorithmic pacing. Some works generate intensity through repetition and withholding, while others explore displacement through silence, saturation, or fragmentation. In these instances, affect emerges as a force that both grounds and destabilizes cultural identity.
Possible areas of focus include:
• Emotional containment and repression in colonial and post-imperial literatures
• Ritual, repetition, and rhythm within heritage cinema and television
• Diasporic memory and displaced attachment in transnational texts
• Platform logic and algorithmic pacing of affect
• Affective strategies of overflow, stillness, or fragmentation
The sessions aim to foster sustained dialogue on the emotional structures that bind and fracture collective identities. The seminar welcomes contributions grounded in affect theory, comparative literature, media studies, and memory studies. Graduate researchers and faculty are encouraged to join.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Yao Xiang, an MA student in Language and Intercultural Studies at the University of Leeds, UK, explores narrative and representational strategies in East Asian cultures. With a focus on transcultural theoretical perspectives, the research examines how literary and cultural texts shape and challenge cultural stereotypes and identity boundaries.
Speaker Bio
Mary Rhodes (She/her) is an M.A. student in the English program at Wake Forest University. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia in 2023, and works in the field of contemporary Irish literature, with a particular interest in women poets, memory and empathy studies, and psychology and literature.
Speaker Bio
Allysha Vineberg is a PhD candidate in English Literature at York University. Her dissertation unites sound studies with affect theory in order to explore disasters and the practice of everyday life. In doing so, Allysha's dissertation looks at contemporary works that navigate these situations in order to understand our emotional positioning and response to two distinct human experiences.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Asra Jafarey holds a BA (Hons) in English from LUMS and an MSc in Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her undergraduate thesis examined the intersections of desire, colonialism, and Islam through a feminist reading of Richard Burton’s The Perfumed Garden, while her master’s dissertation theorised “subjectivity-in-flux” in Muslim women’s diasporic narratives. She currently teaches African Literature at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi.
Speaker Bio
Chen XING is a second-year Ph.D student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She holds a BA in English from Sun Yat-sen University and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong. She used to be a book editor at the China Youth Press handling non-fiction publications. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Sinophone literature, women's writing, memory and trauma studies, affect theory, posthumanism, non-human studies, and environmental humanities.
Speaker Bio
Estelle Yihe Zhang is a graduate student at Duke University's Critical Asian and Middle Eastern Humanities program. Her academic interests center on visual culture, affect, memory, and media, with a particular focus on contemporary Japanese and Sinophone cinema.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am currently an Associate Professor of German Studies at Colorado College. I earned a PhD in Comparative Literature with a focus on German literature, comparative modernisms, and political literary aesthetics. Recently, I have become interested in affect theory and queer theory, and this paper is a reflection of this new direction in my research.
Speaker Bio
Violet (Xinting) Chen graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in Cinema and Media Studies with honors and a B.S. in Film and Television. Her undergraduate thesis explores Asian American racial melancholia and the haunting effects of the Model Minority Myth and historical oppression. Her research interests include Asian American cinema, the Asian immigrant diaspora, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and film theory. Her favorite film is The Rider (2017) by Chloé Zhao.
Speaker Bio
Bora Kang is completing a PhD in English at Binghamton University, with research focused on affect, literature, and media in relation to national and cultural identity.