Seminars

Anyone who would like to organize a seminar for our 2019 Annual Meeting (March 7-10, Georgetown University, Washington, DC) must first post a call for papers here. Calls for papers will be accepted through Thursday, August 30, at 9 a.m. EST.

Unthinking Affect: Blackness, Incapacity, Negativity

Organizer: Tyrone S. Palmer

“... the slave occupies the position of the unthought. So what does it mean to try to bring that position into view without making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void... more

Violence: Of the Idiom

Organizer: Tyler M. Williams

Jacques Derrida first hardened the common notion of “idiom” into a rigorous concept. No longer referring to mere peculiarities of a language or its expressions, for Derrida the idiom now names... more

Pleasure and Precarity at the Edge: Reading the Beach and the Harbor

Organizer: Hannah Freed-Thall

Beaches and harbors are precarious borderlands: sites of prohibition and pleasure, labor and play, exposure and refuge. In these liminal spaces, interrelations among sexuality, social class,... more

Labor, Leisure, and New Media Literacy in the Global South

Organizer: Paloma Duong

Vloggers in the morning, selfie specialists in the afternoon, crowd-sourced content generators in the evening, dogged resellers of pirated symbolic goods and uber drivers in the weekend, the gig... more

Rural Resistance

Organizer: Stefka Hristova

Rural Political Resistance The rural is often figured as a temporally backwards and politically conservative mass. In the context of Italy, Antonio Gramsci considered the rural to be... more

Aesthetic Afterlives

Organizer: Robert Lehman

Beginning perhaps with the 1994 publication of George Levine’s edited collection Aesthetics and Ideology, the last few decades have seen literary critics returning to matters of pleasure, of the... more

Poetry and Urban Transformation

Organizer: Davy Knittle

How does poetry model, resist and press against the material transformation of cities and urban regions? How do poems engage with urban change as it shapes the movement of people, commodities, and... more

Material Connections / Literary Articulations

Organizer: Jocelyn Holland

The premise of this seminar is that material forms of connection and practices of connecting have, over time, left traces in a wide variety of discourses, whereby some traces are more visible than... more

Race and the Psychoanalytic Clinic

Organizer: Linette Park

Psychoanalytic theory continues to be a powerfully productive discourse for queer theory, critical race theory, Asian-American studies, and Black studies. Queer theorists, for example, have located... more

Contemporary Literatures of Difference

Organizer: Daniel Chaskes

This seminar welcomes proposals for papers on resistance to everyday, lived experience in contemporary literature. Such resistance may be seen in the construction of imagined places construed as... more

The Faces of Depression in Literature

Organizer: Josefa Ros Velasco

THE FACES OF DEPRESSION IN LITERATURE Organizer: Prof. Dr. Josefa Ros Velasco (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University) rosvelasco@fas.harvard.edu... more

Creative Writing on Nonfiction

Organizer: Dibakar Pal

The best creative writing is critical, and the best critical writing is creative. Papers are invited from scholars, creative writers, indepedent scholars on any topic on Creative Writing... more

Linguistic (Re)Turns

Organizer: Luke Mueller

One might argue that the study of literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries is inseparable from its turns to language. Following I.A. Richards’s turn to Bertrand Russell, De Man’s to... more

Politics and Ontology

Organizer: Matthew Scully

Politics, as that which relates to the organization of public life, and ontology, as the study of being, have long been intertwined. Left/right identity politics, for example, often ground themselves... more

Sacred Troubling Topics in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an

Organizer: Roberta Sabbath

Abrahamic sacred texts continue to inspire a diversity of scholarship that seeks to transform the ancient into the contemporary, the remote into the immediate, and the distant into the visceral... more

Transregional Postcolonialisms: Queer Remainders of Disappearing Imperialism

Organizer: Ryanson Ku

In a perennially globalizing world, the deconstruction of borders has given impetus to manifold critical responses, notably US empire, postcolonial, and queer critique. US empire studies shows that... more

New Oralities

Organizer: Charlotte Eubanks

Conceptions of “orality,” a big idea of the 1980s, held that the introduction of writing enforced global, fundamental cognitive changes to human society. That model has exhausted itself. What’s next... more

From Migrant to Refugee: Theorizing Diasporic Identities

Organizer: Jocelyn Frelier

“Refugee and immigrant are very different. A refugee is someone ejected from his or her past, who has no future, whose present is totally empty of meaning. In a refugee camp, you live outside of time... more

Becoming Attached: Attachment’s Role in Literary History and Theory

Organizer: Theo Davis

The idea that cultivating and emphasizing attachment to literature is a central part of the study of literary culture has gained ground in recent years. The turn to attachment is a part of arguments... more

World Literature and Global Learning

Organizer: Angela Flury

Scholars continue to probe the depth of disciplinary practices in order to lay bare, and perhaps move beyond, the literary legacy of colonialism. Examples include Michael Allan’s In the Shadow of... more

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