This panel explores the cultural, artistic, and transnational dimensions of trauma. We invite papers that examine how traumatic experience is encoded, recalled, and represented through embodied and sensory experience across various linguistic, artistic, and cultural traditions. How do artists engage with the body and the sensorium to convey post-traumatic memory? How do affect, memory, and mental illness intersect in post-traumatic artistic production? Seeking to bring trauma studies into closer dialogue with fields like affect theory, phenomenology, mad studies, disability studies, or critical Indigenous studies, this seminar explores how extreme experiences shape perception, memory, and identity globally. We are particularly interested in comparative approaches to how artists and writers navigate the challenges of representing events that resist conventional narrative, and how these aesthetic innovations reshape both individual and collective memory across shifting historical and political landscapes.

Relevant topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Transnational or cross-media depictions of trauma in literature, film, performance, and visual arts.
• The role of the body and sensory experience in encoding, recalling, and transforming traumatic memory.
• The impact of trauma on personal and collective life narratives and the construction of identity.
• The relationship between traumatic experience and mental illnesses like PTSD, anxiety, or depression.
• The role of power, marginalization, and collective trauma in shaping memory and representation (e.g., in post-colonial, queer, or Indigenous contexts).
• The formal or aesthetic innovations that artists use to represent experiences that defy traditional storytelling.
• Comparative analyses that cross national, linguistic, or historical boundaries to trace global or localized aesthetics of traumatic memory.