What does it mean for a novel, film, play, television series, podcast, or work to be “based on a true story”? The phrase is at once familiar and unstable. It promises access to reality while announcing transformation; it invokes evidence while authorizing invention; it can signal historical responsibility, but it can also function as commercial appeal. If, as L.Hutcheon argues, adaptation is “repetition without replication,” what happens when the source being repeated is not a prior text but a historical event, criminal case, or lived experience? This seminar asks how “true stories” become narrative objects across media, genres, languages, and cultures.

Moving beyond what Robert Stam has influentially critiqued as fidelity-based models of adaptation, we invite papers that approach the “true story” not as a stable origin but as a contested field of documents, memories, archives, rumors, images, journalistic accounts, and collective investments. Historical events, criminal cases, family histories, political scandals, wars, trials, disasters, and acts of violence often circulate through multiple forms before becoming literature, cinema, theater, television, or other media. In the process, they are condensed, aestheticized, fictionalized, moralized, and sometimes commodified.

The seminar is interested in the ethical and aesthetic problems raised by adapting lived experience and historical reality. What responsibilities do creators assume toward victims, witnesses, survivors, and communities? How do adaptations negotiate the tension between factual accuracy and narrative force? What happens when a work invents dialogue, motive, or closure where the archive remains ambiguous or silent? When does adaptation become an act of recovery, and when does it risk sensationalism, appropriation, or exploitation?

We welcome papers on a wide range of regions, languages, and media. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• adaptations of historical events into novels, films, plays, television series, comics, podcasts, or digital media
• the aesthetics and ethics of true crime
• adaptation and collective memory, postmemory, trauma, and witnessing
• documentary fiction, docudrama, autofiction, biopics, historical novels
• the use of archives, photographs, legal documents, interviews, recordings, and footage in fictional or semi-fictional works
• the commodification of suffering, violence, and victimhood in popular media
• comparative approaches to the same true story across multiple adaptations, media, languages, or national contexts
• literary or cinematic representations of criminal cases

This seminar asks what is at stake when real lives and historical events are transformed into narrative form. How do adaptations of real events shape public memory, redistribute sympathy, produce knowledge, or transform suffering into aesthetic and commercial form? 

For any questions email Dr. Priscilla Charrat Nelson [email protected] or Dr. Claire Rodan [email protected]