Seminars

"Beyond the Facts": Photography and Form

Organizer: Tavid Mulder

When questioned on the simplicity of his photographs of a changing landscape in what he called the New West, Robert Adams answered that “photographs are only convincing if the photographer pays... more

Binding Vulnerability: Representing Foreignness and Migrancy in the 21st Century.

Organizer: Sharon Marquart

Current tensions in Europe and North America over migrant, immigrant, and minority populations have given rise to a variety of representations of vulnerability appealing to a wide political spectrum... more

Women and Sex and Talk

Organizer: John Paul Ricco

Over 20 years since Candace Vogler’s important essay “Sex and Talk” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 1998), and in the midst of the #MeToo movement and what has been referred to as the "#MeToo novel," this... more

Runaway Genres: the Global Afterlives of Slavery

Organizer: Sangeeta Ray

Title: Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery In Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery, Yogita Goyal argues that slavery has emerged as the defining template through which... more

Up in the Air: Atmospheres in the Anthropocene

Organizer: Dora Zhang

The concept of atmosphere and its cognates - milieu, ambiance, mood, Stimmung - are increasingly, so to speak, in the air. Although it is a ubiquitous feature of our daily lives and our warming... more

The University We Want

Organizer: Ian Butcher

The University We Want This seminar asks when we let ourselves engage in utopian thinking, what do we want the university to be? We recognize that the university needs to change, but what... more

Correspondence/Discordance: The Postal Motif in Iberian and Ibero-american Film

Organizer: Steven Marsh

The epistolary form has a long history in film. In 2006 filmmakers Víctor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami collaborated in the exchange of video postcards. This was followed by the The Complete... more

History and the Time of Speculative Ecology

Organizer: Kurt Cavender

A decade ago, Dipesh Chakrabarty declared in “The Climate of History: Four Theses” that understanding climate change required a transformation in our concept of history. This seminar poses... more

Speaking Truth for Power: Writing, Reality, and the State in Medieval and Early Modern Islamic Literature and Criticism

Organizer: Rob Ames

This seminar aims to interrogate the relationship between power, the act of writing, and the representation of reality within pre-modern Islamic literatures (broadly conceived as writing produced... more

Anticommunist Imaginary

Organizer: Alla Ivanchikova

While most cultural theorists, since Edward Said, have been attuned to the dangers of Orientalism, they are less conscious of the long-term othering strategies that originated in the Cold War that... more

Cold War Humanism

Organizer: Peter Kalliney

This panel addresses the aesthetic trends, cultural institutions, and literary movements that emerged in the Third World during the Cold War. Decolonization in Africa and Asia ushered in a new period... more

Dreaming within/beyond the Crisis of the Present

Organizer: Geordie Miller

What happens to a dream defeated? The dream in question is as old as modernity: the dream of an alternative to capitalism. Current and looming crises would seem to make a mockery of the question. For... more

Memory and Materiality in Postcolonial and Postsocialist Literatures

Organizer: Diviani Chaudhuri

From heirlooms and objects of daily use to monuments and private residence, materiality prompts and shapes memoryscapes. Material culture and the built environment are mobilised to reappropriate and... more

Pierogi and Plum Brandy: Cultures of Consumption in Russian & Eastern European Literature

Organizer: Drago Momcilovic

From the restorative wines of Marko Kraljevic to the apple wedges festering in Gregor Samsa's back and the grand feasts peppering the novels of Gogol and Dostoevsky, images of food and drink in the... more

Erotic Entanglements: Forms and Structures of Desire in Premodern Persian Literature

Organizer: Matthew Miller

Few concepts have dominated premodern Persian literature as much as love, eros, lust, passion, commitment - the many ideas and ideals of desire. Discourses on desire are... more

Latinx Modernisms

Organizer: John Cutler

This seminar proposes to explore Latinx modernism(s) as a set of challenges both to modernist studies broadly construed and to Latinx literary studies internally. A handful of Latinx studies scholars... more

Imagined Communities in World Literature

Organizer: A. Ozge Kocak Hemmat

Community, simply defined, is a network of individuals and groups, connected to one another on multiple intersecting accounts, ranging from needs, kinship and ethnicity to cultural, artistic or... more

Style: Beyond Form

Organizer: Michael Dango

The past decade has seen an outpouring of work on form. Relatively little, by comparison, has foregrounded style. What is the relation between form and style? How does style get us leverage on... more

Global Slaveries

Organizer: Laura Murphy

Despite its utterly inhumane contours, slavery is a wholly human endeavor, an exploitative relationship between an extractor of labor and a producer of labor. At the same time, as an institution... more

SF in/of China

Organizer: Cara Healey

This seminar seeks to create a cross-cultural and intraregional dialogue on China in SF (speculative fiction / science fiction / science fantasy) and Chinese SF. An imagined “China” has... more

ACLA