Seminars

Please select a seminar for which you would like to propose a paper. Current ACLA guidelines specify that each ACLA member may submit only ONE PAPER for consideration. Abstracts must be received by Monday, September 23, 2019 at 9 a.m. EST.

Agamben's Later Works

Organizer: Frances Restuccia

This seminar will focus on the later works of Giorgio Agamben, mainly The Use of Bodies and studies published in English during or after 2015: e.g., Pilate and Jesus, The Fire and the Tale, The... more

Political Implications of the Poetics of Philosophy

Organizer: Osman Nemli

Following world shattering social and political events in the 20th century, philosophy’s ability to be an adequate or efficacious discipline to change, let alone interpret, the world was brought into... more

Nature's Desire

Organizer: Tom Carlson

In “The First Elegy” written at Duino, Rilke tells us “Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star / was waiting for you to notice it.” The statement is exhilarating. Why? Could it be because we... more

Rabindranath Tagore and his Creative Genius

Organizer: Medha Bhattacharyya

Rabindranath Tagore was the first Nobel Laureate of Asia. He was a multi-talented genius. He experimented in several fields of creativity namely, song, dance, poetry, dramas, short stories, novels,... more

The Enemy Image of the Jew in World Literature

Organizer: Wisam Chaleila

This seminar seeks to examine the motif of the multiple enemy images of the Jew in American and European literatures / world literature. The enemy image of the Jew is usually illustrated as a... more

Between Migration and Diaspora: Formal Meditations on SWANA Narratives of Displacement

Organizer: Leila Pazargadi

This seminar seeks to explore narratives from writers moving in and out of Southwest Asian and North African countries, particularly, as they experience themes of loss, displacement, exile, and im/... more

Unfolding the Untold: New Stories from Old Parables

Organizer: TULIN ECE TOSUN

“I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new one makes the... more

Emerging Subjects: Transnational Modernism and the Urban Imaginary

Organizer: Desmond Harding

Emerging Subjects: Transnational Modernism and the Urban Imaginary In recent years the geographical, temporal, and cultural lineage of canonical modernism as the assumed outgrowth of Anglo-... more

In/finity is now: Temporality and Impasse in the Time of Precarities

Organizer: Futoshi Tomori

In a lecture given in 1996, the late novelist Toni Morrison postulates, “Infinity is now, apparently, the domain of the past…Twenty or forty years into the twenty-first century appears to be all... more

Oil & Water

Organizer: Délice Williams

Oil is everywhere, and that fact about the material world is generating more and more interest in a range of fields. Signs of the increasing visibility of oil as an object of study in the... more

The Poetics and Politics of Eco-Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary World Literature

Organizer: Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim

In the light of the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, there has been an increasing interest in material contexts, embodied experiences, and situated forms of knowledge. In this... more

Sexual Difference and Cultural Difference

Organizer: Yitian Zhai

Feminist philosophy rarely takes the non-Western ideas as its theoretical resources. Now that gender plurality has been dominating the feminist theories over the past decade, it is easy to... more

Latinx Life Writing: Past, Present, and Future

Organizer: Christine Fernandez

This seminar will bring together scholars engaging thematic and generic issues in Latinx Life Writing. Texts from life writing genres including memoir, autobiography, autoethnography, oral history,... more

The Other of Postcolonial Studies: The Postcolonial Islands, Their Unique Sensibility and Challenges

Organizer: Nick Tsung-Che Lu

In their seminal book, Islands in History and Representation, Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith famously point out that stories about islands tend “to slip the net of postcolonial theorising” due to their... more

Modernity @ Zero Hour: The Question of the Universal and the Origins of the Global Order

Organizer: Barrett Watten

This seminar will address the relationship between literary modernism (traditionally seen as having its end date at 1945, but expanded to include work in genres not usually associated with high... more

Speculative Fiction Outside the Anglosphere

Organizer: Ian Campbell

This seminar will discuss works of SF, broadly defined, that were originally published in languages other than English. The question we will discuss is how a particular text uses diction, grammar or... more

Literature on Drugs

Organizer: Trisha Urmi Banerjee

Drugs can lead to addiction or exorbitant wealth, friendship or incarceration, championship titles or memory loss. Against the backdrop of fervent contemporary conversations spanning domestic and... more

Modernist Studies, Contemporary Problems: Towards a Comparative Literature of Objects, Genre, and Mediation

Organizer: Alexander Jones

In the past decade, modernist studies has been animated by the issue of periodization. As a concept, modernism has been projected backwards and forwards in space and time. Attempts to clarify the “... more

Cry, Beloved Homeland

Organizer: bharati jagannathan

Human beings have always moved from one place to another; the very dispersal of people across the globe is evidence of this historical transhumance. And yet, in much of recorded history, while some... more

Decay Theory

Organizer: Christopher Walker

Scholars have recently turned to processes of decay as a way to theorize what has been excluded or marginalized in totalizing formulations of capital, the Anthropocene, and the global. From within... more

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