This seminar explores accent – a slippery and seductive concept with intersectional and interdisciplinary reach – as a mode of cultural production and interpretation.

Accent has never been more audible, commodified, or policed than it is now, in an era of forced migration, diaspora formation, virtual labor, and artificial intelligence. Complex industries, including call centers, voice-recognition, and dialect coaching, are devoted to the training, detection, neutralization, and monetization of particular accents. Accents cost people their jobs, housing applications, and asylum claims, and accented speakers continue to function as humorous punchlines on television and film. At the same time, everyday acts of refusal by accented subjects abound; teachers, migrant workers, interpreters, and data analysts daily challenge systems that confine them within dominant orders.

Building on the edited collection Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (UC Press, 2023; winner of the 2024 ACLA René Wellek Prize), this seminar will explore accented thinking as a way to disturb the normative logic of academic disciplines, archival practices, media conventions, legal systems, and bureaucratic structures. The affordances of accent are multiple: it is a concept that both does and does not index identity, a comparative method that foregrounds positionality and relationality, and an object of salience across numerous fields of inquiry. What new forms of critical thinking might emerge when accent is foregrounded as object, method, and practice? What might a comparative, dialogical  approach to accent reveal about existing frameworks in literary, cultural, and media studies? How might the concept of accent itself be stretched and transformed as we consider not just its linguistic dimensions, but its intermedial, transnational, and metacritical interventions? 

We invite papers that perform accented thinking and span textual, archival, ethnographic, multimodal, and other hybrid approaches across time periods and linguistic contexts. We seek analyses that embrace the unsettling and undisciplined potential of accent as both an aesthetic and a way of knowing.

Potential topics include: 

• Voice and race; raciolinguistics; “skin tones” and accented audibilities
• Digital technologies and the AI voice; Siri, Alexa, and chatbot companions
• Audiobooks, accessibility, and accented reading
• Accent modification, reduction, and neutralization across institutions and professions, from the call center to the black box theater
• Migration studies and literatures; accent as “a biography of migration”; accent as an analytic in border studies
• Vernacularity and dialect; accented approaches to indigeneity
• Literature, multilingualism, and the politics and practice of literary translation
• Collaborative criticism; dialogical methods in the humanities and social sciences
• Accented criticism across languages, regions, and Global South literatures