Seminars

Concretism: A Global Dialogue II

Organizer: Patrick Greaney

In 1960, Max Bill curated the exhibit “Concrete Art, 50 Years of Development” in Zürich. Showing work by over 100 participants from two dozen countries, he also positioned himself as leader of this... more

Crime Fiction and Global Spaces Part II

Organizer: Patrick Deer

The transnational “turn” in crime fiction and studies of the genre has produced a new understanding of the complex interplays between crime, policing and security. Just as crime is increasingly... more

Polyglot Minds and Bodies Politic II

Organizer: Marlene Hansen Esplin

Translators live polyglot lives. Our languages may serve different social functions, they may allow us to access different economies, or even to inhabit different selves, ontological statuses, or... more

Health and Embodiment: Narrative and Visual Cultures II

Organizer: Michael Klein

Theories of health and the body have been increasingly influenced by film, television, photography, pop art, and material culture— just as these forms have been impacted by theories of the body,... more

Thinking in Forms II: Narrative and the Affordances of Experience

Organizer: Corina Stan

What is the connection between narrative and experience? This seminar proposes to explore this relationship, taking “experience” both in the twofold Benjaminian sense of discrete life occurrences (... more

Ghostpitality II

Organizer: Elizabeth Wijaya

What is the relation between the hospitable house and the haunted house? In a haunted house, who or what extends a welcome? Who invites whom in? When Jacques Derrida devoted his seminars to the... more

Exposing the Coloniality of Power in Theory, Literature, and Films

Organizer: Badreddine Ben Othman

According to Walter Mignolo (2007, 2013), the "coloniality of power" is the logic of domination, exploitation, and oppression that makes the triumphal narrative of "modernity" possible. Modernity is... more

Rethinking the Transnational: Across Media and Beyond Area

Organizer: Andrea Mendoza

Organizers: Julia Alekseyeva, Andrea Mendoza, Keiji Kunigami Our seminar interrogates the implications of the transnational across diverse media. Operating at a liminal space between national and... more

Shifting Borders and Shapeshifters: European/ Balkan/Russian Monsters 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Organizer: Thomas Garza

The shift in the geopolitical landscape of Europe, the Balkans, and Russia following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created new cultural... more

Indian Melodrama: Transnational Mobilities, Cross-Pollinations and Cinematic Reinventions

Organizer: Anupama Kapse

How have worldwide melodramatic forms been modified and taken up by South Asia’s many cinemas? Examining the role of gesture, musicality and aural practices in the constitution of a recognizable... more

"Uno y otro / Uno e altro": Intersecting Visions of Latin America and Italy

Organizer: Francesca Parmeggiani

This seminar seeks to explore historical and cultural exchanges between Latin America and Italy, as well as the presence of one in the literary, artistic and political imaginary of the other. Its... more

Toward New Theories and Histories of Romance

Organizer: Joel Childers

For many scholars of the twentieth century, “romance” has proved an enticing genre by which to narrate the advent of (literary) modernity. In the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries, “romans” signified... more

Rights, Justice, Language: Werner Hamacher and the Political

Organizer: Jonathan Luftig

Werner Hamacher’s posthumous last book, Sprachgerechtigheit ,was published only very recently, about one year after his untimely death. Its title is programmatic since it collects much of his late... more

Environment and Loss

Organizer: Chris Malcolm

Today the thought of the environment is tied to the thought of loss. At times, the economy of loss is synonymous with the environment. Concerns about populations displaced by changing conditions... more

Polyglot Minds and Bodies Politic I

Organizer: Isabel Gómez

The Child, the Parent: Ethics, Politics, Race

Organizer: Cynthia Quarrie

The child is a figure onto whom mythic pasts and anxious futures are regularly projected, and as such often bears much mystifying affective weight. Sentimentalized and innocent, but also demonic and... more

Hej, Sloveni, Let's Remember Yugoslavia!

Organizer: Anita Lukic

The current strains of right-wing nationalism that are troubling the EU and NATO consensus in the US and Europe require us to reflect not only on their historical origins but on their rhetorical and... more

"‘Europe’ in Contemporary Literature and in Literary Studies"

Organizer: Friederike Eigler

Recent scholarship and creative writing have addressed the European project and cultural imaginaries of Europe in innovative ways. Examples include special issues on the future of Europe [New... more

Postwar Cinema/Images and Nuclear Catastrophe

Organizer: Brett Ashley Kaplan

The political-historical moment of precarity in which we now live, where nuclear catastrophe again seems possible if not probable, calls for renewed readings of postwar images such as the 1962 Soviet... more

Properties of the "Global" Novel: : Comparative and Otherwise

Organizer: Sangeeta Ray

The novel has been criticized for being Eurocentric, implicitly liberal, and increasingly removed from the field’s most innovative directions (e.g. the turn to popular forms, virtual worlds, or the... more

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