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Seminars

Anyone who would like to organize a seminar for our 2023 Annual Meeting (Sheraton Grand in Chicago, Illinois, March 16-19, 2023) must first post a call for papers here. Calls for papers will be accepted through September 30, 2022.

The Pharmakon Today

Organizer: Bishupal Limbu

What is the relevance of the pharmakon today in literary and cultural studies, more than half a century after Derrida first published “La pharmacie de Platon”? In Greek, a pharmakon (φάρμακον) means... more

How to Do Theory with Examples

Organizer: Dylan Furcall

Conventionally understood, we give examples to lend concreteness to abstract theories. Moreover, we find examples in the world imminently available for use, like seeds “sown [...] broadcast... more

Oceanic (Dis)Orientations

Organizer: Kritish Rajbhandari

In Wild Blue Media (2020), Melody Jue theorizes the ocean as an environment for interpretation. Water’s "conceptual displacement" requires a rethinking of concepts, objects, and media. For... more

The Digital Topography

Organizer: Jacqueline Chia

This panel is an ongoing meditation of narratives and digital environments and the ways of being, knowing, and sensing within digital topographies. This is the third seminar of this research. For... more

Race, Queerness, and the (Long) Millenial Novel

Organizer: J. Brendan Shaw

Much has been written in the popular press about generational shifts and especially what and who are the Millenials – those people who were born in the late 1980s through the late 1990s. An element... more

The Violence of Modernity in Women's Narratives

Organizer: Geetha Ramanathan

Extensive research on western industrial modernity in the twentieth century has explored the potential for women’s emancipation in society and representation in the civic order. Scholars have... more

Beyond Modernity as a Queer Aesthetic Project

Organizer: Isabel von Holt

What comes after modernity? Numerous thinkers ranging from Jürgen Habermas and Bruno Latour to Walter Mignolo and Rita Segato have explored this topic, illuminating the landscape of late capitalism,... more

Ante-Disciplinarity and Black Study

Organizer: Seulghee Lee

This seminar aims to conceptualize ante-disciplinarity. Toward the end of “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), Zora Neale Hurston writes: “To those who want to institute a Negro theatre,... more

Methodologies of Literature and Science

Organizer: Naomi Michalowicz

When we employ the formulation “literature and science,” what work does the “and” do, exactly? What are the methodological choices, comparative tools, and shared presumptions collapsed into this... more

Anticolonial Poetics in Form and Performance

Organizer: Allison Gibeily

This seminar considers the political force of poetic form for anticolonial poets and poetries from multiple contexts. We understand poetic form to encompass everything from meter and rhyme, strophe... more

Aesthetic Agonisms

Organizer: John Brenkman

The association of aesthetic judgment with consensus, universality, taste, and value is widely disputed, often to the point of rejecting the concept itself. Can an agonistic conception reinvigorate... more

States of Trance/Trans

Organizer: Kendra Atkin

What is a state? We might think of the national institution, The State, as the organizing structure of modern sovereign power. To state something may also be to make a declaration, to sure something... more

Modernist Prolegomena

Organizer: Anna Torres-Cacoullos

As prefatory interventions, paratexts such as prologues, prefaces,  preambles, dedicatory letters, and addresses to readers have largely been neglected by scholars of modernist literatures... more

Force, in Theory

Organizer: Adam Frank

            How might it be possible to think the concept of force from a contemporary standpoint in the theoretical humanities? Whether as... more

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