This seminar asks what it means to teach the “world” in fields such as world cinema, world literature, comparative literature, and global media studies. Courses organized around the world often promise breadth, diversity, and cross-cultural understanding, but they also face practical and conceptual problems. What counts as the world? How does the nation appear in “world” courses? How do syllabi balance coverage, depth, translation, historical context, aesthetics, and political urgency? How do institutional expectations and restrictions mold the student imagination of the “world”? How does the positionality of the instructor presuppose, structure, or influence the “world” classroom? 

The seminar invites papers on the pedagogy of world cinema, media, literature, and related fields. We welcome reflections on syllabus design, classroom practice, study abroad programs, canonicity, national, regional, and transnational frameworks, diaspora, migration, colonial and postcolonial histories, language, accessibility, and the politics of curation. Participants might address how a single course constructs the world, how students respond to unfamiliar forms and contexts, how films or texts travel across classrooms, or how teaching the world changes across institutional locations. 

Through the discussions generated by this seminar, we hope to gather strategies for reimagining “world” courses in film, literature, and new media classrooms. Therefore, this seminar is especially interested in approaches that treat pedagogy as a site of theory. How do teaching practices revise our understanding of the world itself? What models of the world do our classrooms reproduce, and what alternative worlds might they make possible?

We welcome both theoretical reflections and concrete case studies, including discussions of specific courses, syllabi, assignments, classroom practices, films, texts, or teaching contexts.