This seminar asks how literature participates in the making of rivers as collective memory sites and heritage landscapes. Rivers have long organized literary form and historical consciousness: they mark borders, enable migration, sustain ritual life, and archive ecological change. Yet unlike monuments, ruins, or museums, rivers are materially dynamic and relational. In their challenge to static models of the “site of memory,” they invite attention to memory as flow, confluence, submergence, and contamination.

Drawing on recent work in the blue humanities, literary geography, critical heritage studies, Indigenous studies, and memory studies, this seminar examines rivers as participants in literary place-making. The goal is to consider not just how texts represent rivers, but how literary works contribute to the affective and political valences attached to actual riverine sites. 

Paper topics might include river writing, literary tourism, Indigenous river epistemologies, hydrocolonialism, river personhood, border rivers, extractive infrastructures, and the formal relation between narrative and fluvial movement. How do literary and performance practices attach memory to rivers? How do they contest state, developmentalist, or touristic framings of river heritage? What happens when rivers become “archives” of bodies, pollutants, ruins, or ancestral presence? How do translation, adaptation, and world-literary circulation alter the memory of particular rivers? How might literary studies rethink scale and collectivity through watersheds rather than nations?

The seminar also invites methodological reflection. Rivers cross national, disciplinary, and ecological boundaries, making them privileged objects for comparative study. At the same time, comparison risks flattening historically specific relations among ecology, sacred value, and local memory. We therefore ask how concepts such as travelling memory, more-than-human agency, and counter-heritage might help us read rivers capaciously without reducing them to metaphor. Ultimately, the seminar proposes rivers as key sites for rethinking literary memory studies in an age of climate crisis, infrastructural violence, and renewed struggles over land, water, sovereignty, and heritage.