"I am not a woman writer." Toril Moi's well-known assertion captures a persistent tension at the heart of feminist literary criticism: if recovering women's writing has been central to feminist scholarship, why have some writers and critics resisted the category of the "woman writer" itself? Such refusals do not reject feminist recovery so much as reveal a deeper paradox: authorship has never been a neutral or universally available category, and the struggle to be recognized as an author has always unfolded within unequal histories of gender, race, caste, colonialism, language, and literary institutionality

Our seminar begins from that paradox: rather than simply who counts as an author, how does literary authority become publicly recognizable? Through which historical, institutional, linguistic, and cultural processes are authors made? French poststructuralist thought (Barthes, Foucault, Cixous) challenged the coherence of the sovereign author, while feminist (Eagleton, Susie Tharu), Black (Walker, Hartman), and postcolonial scholarship (Orsini, Goulding, Mandhwani) extended questions of authorship into differently situated histories of authority and recognition. Read together, these traditions invite us to ask what it means to unsettle authorial authority when the capacity to claim it has itself been historically uneven. We therefore approach authorship as a contingent process of authorization, mediation, negotiation, and recognition rather than as a static category.

If literary authority is historically contingent and institutionally produced, through what processes does someone become recognizable and legitimate as an author? How do publishers, editors, translators, critics, archives, prizes, copyright regimes, and reading communities participate in authoring the author? What forms of literary labor remain invisible, and whose claims to authorship are deferred, fragmented, or refused? Recognition also raises questions of visibility and performance: how do pseudonyms, alter egos, celebrity, opacity, refusal, or collaborative writing complicate the ideal of the autonomous author? Shifting attention from the author to processes of author-making opens comparative questions while remaining attentive to the unequal conditions that produce authorship.

We welcome papers engaging these questions across periods, languages, and traditions, conversing across literary traditions, methodologies, and disciplinary boundaries.

Possible topics include:

• Translation, multilingualism, and linguistic hierarchies of authority
• Publishing, editing, circulation, and the institutions that make authors
• Literary legitimacy, canon formation, archives, and national literatures
• Copyright, ownership, adaptation, censorship, and literary injury
• Pseudonymity, anonymity, collaboration, celebrity, and authorial performance
• Race, caste, gender, sexuality, disability, migration, and coloniality as conditions of recognition
• Comparative histories of authorship across unequal literary worlds