Seminars

The Embodied Turn: (Digital) Affordances for Empirical Research on (Postcolonial) Narrative Genres

Organizer: Saskia Schabio

This seminar explores implications of the ‘embodied turn’ (cf. Hillesund, Schilhab, Mangen: 2022) and New Materialism (cf. Barad 2013) for the comparative, empirical study of (postcolonial) narrative... more

Orientation via Texts and Communication

Organizer: Reinhard Mueller

How do we orient ourselves to texts? How do texts orientate us and how can they transform us? How do texts shape the world that we orient ourselves in? And how do the ways we orient ourselves to each... more

Going Beyond the Literary II: Caribbean Interdisciplinarity

Organizer: Kavita Singh

This seminar follows on a previous ACLA seminar where Caribbean studies scholars presented work that went beyond traditional literary analyses to engage ethnographic, linguistic, historical, artistic... more

The Implications of Changing Laws of Liability in Contemporary Legal Studies

Organizer: Salvatore Tolone Azzariti

The protocols of liability contextualize confrontation, information and conditions. The non-conformity to ethics and negligence to assess the risk and disregarding the consent procedures are the... more

New Perspectives on Authorship: from Historiography to Linguistics to AI

Organizer: Daniel Emiliano Barrera Rivera

There are plenty of authorship attribution methods, but very few critical theory. Since the days of French Theory, critical discussion about the role of the author diminished. Yet, identity politics... more

Between Written and Oral Traditions: Revealing the Literary Tradition of the Spoken Voice

Organizer: Michal Peles Almagor

This seminar aims to offer new perspectives on the relations and tensions between oral and written traditions in Jewish modernity and beyond. In studying modern Jewish literature and thought,... more

Modernist Extra-Cinematic Montage

Organizer: Nikita Allgire

Although entering the English language in the late 1920s by way of early theories of cinema and the art of the European Modernist avant-garde, the conceptual and historical trajectories of montage... more

Inhuman Voices: Writing and the Non-Human

Organizer: Katharina Simon

Time and again, literature has reflected on its non-human origins in scenes of writing and invocation. In “Autobiography as De-facement,” de Man conceptualizes prosopopeia as the mechanism in which... more

Mapping Memories of Violence: Role of Visual Texts in Mnemopolitics

Organizer: Ragini Chakraborty

American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White documented the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust through her lens in 1945 and also captured the brutality of border politics and mass migration of the... more

Genre Theory Today

Organizer: Martin Aagaard Jensen

Scholars have turned to genre as both method and topic in recent years. It has arisen as a heuristic for literary sociologists, feminist critics and race theorists. At the same time, critics observe... more

Simple Forms and Speech Genres

Organizer: Chris Chiasson

Literariness is a notoriously tricky and/or pointless (elitist, etc.) concept for the study of literature. And yet, it seems difficult to do without entirely. In their different ways, André Jolles,... more

When There is Nothing More to Say – Silence – The Dissolution of Meaning

Organizer: Tim Schmidt

“Silence is constituted by the absence of words but is therefore and simultaneously the presence of their absence” (The language of Silence. Schlant, Ernestine). There will always come that... more

Human Rights Literature and the Politics of Responsibility

Organizer: Arielle Stambler

In recent decades, human rights have risen to prominence as a “dominant discourse for addressing issues of social justice” (Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore 2012, 4). Scholars have demonstrated... more

Many Partitions

Organizer: Anjali Gera Roy

The 1947 Partition of India was one of the most violent events in human history in which a million people lost their lives and fifteen million were forced to cross the border on the east and the west... more

Gendered Memories and Posthuman Embodiments in Reimagined Past and Alternative Futures

Organizer: Wendy Sun

This panel invites interdisciplinary perspectives from memory studies, gender studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism, analyzing modern literature and film. We examine how memories rigorously shape... more

Re-Thinking Transgression: Cultural Critique, Art Theory, and the Emergence of the Historic Avant-gardes

Organizer: Brais Outes-Leon

Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the literary and artistic practices of the historic avant-gardes were surrounded by a robust production of art criticism and journalism that engaged with these new... more

Widening the Field: On Contemporary Poetry Translation

Organizer: Gregory Dunne

This seminar aims to explore the contemporary world of poetry translation and the specific and invigorating challenges that translators are encountering as they work to translate poetries coming from... more

Towards

Organizer: Nicholas Brady

Afropessimism is one name given to a recent movement in thought to consider blackness as a singular condition that throws the categories of the modern world into crisis at the same time as it... 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

Surveying / Language: Tracing Views on Landscapes and Nature, Media and Archaeology, Archivism and Archaism

Organizer: Michael Paninski

What a panorama. What an immeasurable echo-region, here before our eyes. Intoxicating, the furrowed landscape. ... more

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