Seminars

Rethinking the Transnational: Across Media and Beyond Area

Organizer: Andrea Mendoza

Organizers: Julia Alekseyeva, Andrea Mendoza, Keiji Kunigami Our seminar interrogates the implications of the transnational across diverse media. Operating at a liminal space between national and... more

Resilient Bodies: Queer Persistence in a Post-Factual Age (ICLA Gender Studies Committee)

Organizer: Elizabeth Richmond-Garza

This panel explores the persistence of intersectional queer identities under pressure, whether today or elsewhen, whether in America or elsewhere. Whether repressed or outlawed, included or... more

Shifting Borders and Shapeshifters: European/ Balkan/Russian Monsters 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Organizer: Thomas Garza

The shift in the geopolitical landscape of Europe, the Balkans, and Russia following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created new cultural... more

Indian Melodrama: Transnational Mobilities, Cross-Pollinations and Cinematic Reinventions

Organizer: Anupama Kapse

How have worldwide melodramatic forms been modified and taken up by South Asia’s many cinemas? Examining the role of gesture, musicality and aural practices in the constitution of a recognizable... more

"Uno y otro / Uno e altro": Intersecting Visions of Latin America and Italy

Organizer: Francesca Parmeggiani

This seminar seeks to explore historical and cultural exchanges between Latin America and Italy, as well as the presence of one in the literary, artistic and political imaginary of the other. Its... more

Post-communist Perspectives on Medicine, Literature, and Film—Part II

Organizer: Susannah Drissi

This panel constitutes a continuation of a discussion started at the ACLA Annual Meeting held at UCLA last year. In this second iteration, we welcome medical practitioners to complement and enrich... more

Toward New Theories and Histories of Romance

Organizer: Joel Childers

For many scholars of the twentieth century, “romance” has proved an enticing genre by which to narrate the advent of (literary) modernity. In the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries, “romans” signified... more

Rights, Justice, Language: Werner Hamacher and the Political

Organizer: Jonathan Luftig

Werner Hamacher’s posthumous last book, Sprachgerechtigheit ,was published only very recently, about one year after his untimely death. Its title is programmatic since it collects much of his late... more

Environment and Loss

Organizer: Chris Malcolm

Today the thought of the environment is tied to the thought of loss. At times, the economy of loss is synonymous with the environment. Concerns about populations displaced by changing conditions... more

Polyglot Minds and Bodies Politic

Organizer: Isabel Gómez

Translators live polyglot lives. Our languages may serve different social functions, they may allow us to access different economies, or even to inhabit different selves, ontological statuses, or... more

The Child, the Parent: Ethics, Politics, Race

Organizer: Cynthia Quarrie

The child is a figure onto whom mythic pasts and anxious futures are regularly projected, and as such often bears much mystifying affective weight. Sentimentalized and innocent, but also demonic and... more

Hej, Sloveni, Let's Remember Yugoslavia!

Organizer: Anita Lukic

The current strains of right-wing nationalism that are troubling the EU and NATO consensus in the US and Europe require us to reflect not only on their historical origins but on their rhetorical and... more

Dead Reckoning: Navigating Bolaño, Posthumousness, Literature, and History

Organizer: Ryan Long

In 2017 Sepulcros y vaqueros (Tombs and Cowboys) created another star in the constellation of the posthumously published works of Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), which have appeared steadily since the... more

‘Europe’ in Contemporary Literature and in Literary Studies

Organizer: Friederike Eigler

Recent scholarship and creative writing have addressed the European project and cultural imaginaries of Europe in innovative ways. Examples include special issues on the future of Europe [New... more

We Are Black and We Are Watching: Contemporary Black Art and Audienc

Organizer: Maya Hislop

The year 2016 saw the election of a white supremacist to the White House. Ironically or un-ironically, that same year several television series created by young, black writers/creators foregrounding... more

Postwar Cinema/Images and Nuclear Catastrophe

Organizer: Brett Ashley Kaplan

The political-historical moment of precarity in which we now live, where nuclear catastrophe again seems possible if not probable, calls for renewed readings of postwar images such as the 1962 Soviet... more

Properties of the "Global" Novel: : Comparative and Otherwise

Organizer: Sangeeta Ray

The novel has been criticized for being Eurocentric, implicitly liberal, and increasingly removed from the field’s most innovative directions (e.g. the turn to popular forms, virtual worlds, or the... more

The Question of Migration: Language, Bodies, and Movement

Organizer: Estibalitz Ezkerra

This seminar welcomes literary, visual, artistic, and digital representations as well as theoretical approaches to the experience of migration and displacement from the angles of language, bodies,... more

Poetics of Difficulty

Organizer: Amy Hollywood

As Leo Bersani asserts in his Culture of Redemption (1990), “A crucial assumption in the culture of redemption is that a certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs inherently damaged or... more

Bio-orientalim and the Speculative Turn

Organizer: Hilary Thompson

How might we examine contemporary literature about and from Asia in relation to recent turns to biopolitics and/or speculative realism and speculative fiction? Just as theories of... more

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