Seminars

Writing the Body, Writing the Self: Autofiction and Autotheory

Organizer: Jamie Clegg

Organizers: Nirvana Tanoukhi, Jamie Clegg, Charity Scribner This seminar investigates the relationship between autofiction and autotheory. It asks how each mode of... more

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

Posthumanism, Artificial Intelligence: Ishiguro's Klara & the Sun-What does it Mean to be Human?

Organizer: Khaled Alkodimi

This article uses the textual analysis method to read Ishiguro's novel, Klara and The Sun through the lens of posthumanism. It argues that Ishiguro's text is a posthuman novel that depicts the... more

“Neuro Narrative”: Pattern Recognition and Narrative Mode in Fiction

Organizer: Juan Wu

“Neuro Narrative”: Pattern Recognition and Narrative Mode in Fiction Pattern recognition offers a new way to investigate fiction's interrelated or intersecting patterns and narrative modes.... 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

Delightful Dissolutions: Reading Beyond the Borderlands of Theory

Organizer: Anupama K

Delightful Dissolutions: Reading Beyond the Borderlands of Theory “Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the... 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

Disentanglements, retours, détours: (Dis)covering and Recovering the Transatlantic Expressive Arts Archive

Organizer: Marshall Smith

Middle Passage-descended expressive artists including writers, musicians, and visual and performing artists forge the rhizomatic moves and diasporic ambitions, fates, and tragedies of the actors (as... 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

Traumatic Pictures and Ethical Presentation of Children: A Critical Inquiry on Kunda Dixit's A People War (Images of Nepal Conflict 1996-2006)

Organizer: Krishna Prasad Bhattarai

The present research takes Kunda Dixit's picture collection A People War (Images of Nepal Conflict 1996-2006) to reveal the pathetic condition of war-affected children in Nepal. Dixit in this... 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

Energy Imaginaries Beyond Fossil Fuels: New Places, Times, and Methods

Organizer: Johannah King-Slutzky

Despite a widespread preference for technocratic solutions to the climate crisis, we cannot transition to more responsible energy regimes without attending to the socio-historical basis of energy.... 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

The Atomic Now: Aesthetics and Technopolitics of the Nuclear Age

Organizer: Anne-Gaëlle Saliot

The nuclear renaissance has arrived. Today is marked by the increased greenlighting of nuclear energy projects, a nearly unparalleled inching towards possible nuclear Armageddon with the war in... 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

Insurgent Refusals: Rethinking Cartography, Opacity, and Narratives

Organizer: Olga Blomgren

How are authors creating imagined and lived geographies, freed of colonial and imperial constraints? How are translators preserving opacities, and/or what transparencies are they refusing? This... more

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