Affect theory has developed a rich vocabulary for feelings that fail to resolve. Lauren Berlant's account of impasse and exhausted attachment and Kathleen Stewart's sense of how affect gathers density in objects and the texture of ordinary life have reshaped how scholars approach emotional experience. When such tools meet literature, heritage film, and contemporary media, criticism still tends to reach for catharsis and reconciliation as the horizon toward which emotion travels. This seminar proposes a shift in emphasis. It asks what feeling does when it lingers past its occasion, when it accumulates without release, when it simply runs out.

The objects of inquiry range widely across Anglophone literature, heritage film, and contemporary media. The shared interest is residue: the fatigue that follows testimony, the flatness that settles once a ceremony ends, the charge that grows thinner with each repetition.

Two questions anchor the seminar. First, what does affective aftermath reveal about the limits of narrative, memory, and form? Second, what social and aesthetic work do unresolved feelings continue to perform once their occasion has passed? Both questions also bear on identity: how do these afterlives sustain collective and individual belonging even as they fracture it?

The seminar welcomes papers that follow what survives the moment of expression. Modernist and contemporary fiction can hold a flattened, depleted tone in which feeling persists without any arc to carry it. Heritage film and television can stage ceremonial closure that still leaves something behind in objects, landscapes, and silences. Postcolonial and diasporic writing can register the labor and exhaustion of translating a life into legible form. Transnational and digital media can circulate affects that travel badly, generating loss in one place and excess in another.

Possible areas of focus include:

• Flattened tone and depletion in modernist and contemporary fiction
• Ritual, repetition, and residue in heritage cinema and television
• Narrative exhaustion and the limits of testimony in postcolonial and diasporic writing
• Affective aftermaths of trauma and displacement in transnational texts
• Algorithmic pacing, platform logic, and the afterlife of affect online

The seminar welcomes methods including close reading, media and visual analysis, archival research, and theoretical inquiry. Contributions grounded in affect theory, comparative literature, media studies, and memory studies are especially encouraged. Graduate researchers and faculty are both invited to apply.