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Seminars

Thank you to everyone who proposed a seminar for our March 19-22, 2020 conference in Chicago. The Program Committee has made final decisions about seminars and all acceptance letters have already been sent.

Please use the search below to find your seminar for reference (we recommend searching using only one or two keywords for best results). If you have already received an acceptance email but do not see your seminar listed below this does not mean that the status of the seminar has changed. Contact info@acla.org with any questions.

The Work of Feminist Theory

Organizer: Shilyh Warren

Seminar description: In this seminar, we reflexively engage in the work of feminist theory as well as consider its membership, telos, and intellectual histories. The practices of thought that... more

Intellectual Traditions and Literary Form beyond the Crisis of the Present

Organizer: Liam O'Loughlin

This seminar is an extension of an ACLA 2020 seminar entitled “Dreaming within/beyond the Crisis of the Present.” We seek to explore neglected intellectual histories that could reveal worlds beyond... more

New Perspective on the Indian New Wave: Fifty Year On II

Organizer: Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai

This is a split seminar with two parts, both revisiting an extraordinary but neglected moment in Indian film history and the history of global art cinema, extending from 1969 to the 1980s, when a... more

Forecasting 2: More Scenarios for the Future

Organizer: Imre Szeman

Description: The forecast is for 100-year storms and record-breaking temperatures to be the new norm. These daily and weekly predictions are microcosms of what is, in all likelihood, going to be... more

Realism as Theory II: Existence and Epistemology

Organizer: Michael Weinman

This seminar — the continuation of and companion seminar to “Realism as Theory I: Form and Phenomenon” — focuses on how realist literature both mediates and produces knowledge about both the natural... more

Translating Home II: Indigeneity, Nation, and Translator Solidarity (organized by the ICLA Translation Committee)

Organizer: Marlene Esplin

The ICLA Translation Committee invites abstracts for 20-minute papers exploring ways in which translation informs conceptions of migration, refuge, and human rights and shapes notions of indigeneity... more

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

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 old... 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-American... 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

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

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

Porous Borders: Mapping Multilingual Literature in Central and Eastern Europe

Organizer: Stijn Vervaet

Porous Borders: Mapping Multilingual Literature in Central and Eastern Europe In 19th- and 20th-century Central and Eastern Europe (broadly speaking), the layering of different, usually conflicting... more

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