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Seminars

ACLA Undergraduate Seminar "Bad Readers"

Organizer: Karyn Ball

From Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, literature teems with warnings about the perils of “bad reading... more

How to Do Theory with Examples

Organizer: Dylan Furcall

Is an example something one finds or something one makes? We often take for granted that writers passively find examples out in the world to provide a persuasive concreteness where theory feels... more

Watery Graves: Liquid Remembrances and Antiquity

Organizer: Tommaso Bernardini

The flood in Ovid’s Metamorphoses drowns the world; in the Odyssean Charybdis, we find the sea consuming not only men but also itself.  The destructive force of oceanic currents lingers in... more

Australia and . . .

Organizer: Brenda Machosky

Australian literature is not widely known outside of Australia, with the exception of the occasional film, international prize-winning book or television series. For this organizer, Comparative... more

Difficult Diasporas

Organizer: Amrita Mishra

The concept of “diaspora” in global north contexts often invokes communities or bodies marked by the broad category “people of color,” a category scholars such as Jasbir Puar and Anne Anlin Cheng... more

All Natural: History, Philosophy, Theater

Organizer: Christian Obst

To think "nature" not as the "other" of the human — negatively defined as a domain not yet, but to be conquered — is one of the philosophical challenges of our historical moment. This moment is... more

The Culture of Human Rights

Organizer: Muhammad Waqar Azeem

Sophia A. McClennen and Joseph R. Slaughter in “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms” warn: “Human rights are under threat everywhere, especially when the language of human rights is used to... more

The Persistence of National Symptoms

Organizer: Christina Chalmers

This panel poses the question of how we might account for, or construct, a historical symptomatology of the nation-state. That is, a symptomatology of nation-thinking, as well as an examination of... more

Modernism, Religion, and Empire

Organizer: Apala Das

Traditionally, modernism has been thought of as a cluster of aesthetic movements emerging out of a declared crisis of faith. An expanded notion of modernism should therefore take into consideration... more

Pound and World Cultures

Organizer: Jim Cocola

Few writers have exerted as much influence upon modern poetry and yet have concurrently caused so much controversy as Ezra Pound. Even fewer poets devoted as much time and effort as Pound did to the... more

South Asian Digital Humanities

Organizer: Zunaira Yousaf

Roopika Risam in her New Digital Worlds (2019) argues that the postcolonial digital pedagogy aims to show “how print culture has played a role in constructing a world that privileges the... more

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