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Seminars

Renewable Societies: The World after Petrocultures

Organizer: Casey Williams

2025 is the year when global fossil fuel use will finally begin to decrease, ending a period of energy history initiated in the eighteenth century which has traumatized the earth and its inhabitants... more

The Periodical and Method, the Periodical as Method

Organizer: Anthony Stott

In the nearly two decades since Scholes and Latham (2006) proclaimed its arrival, periodical studies has blossomed into a vibrant area of study that has fruitfully defied coherence and orthodoxy by... more

Narratives of Immunity, Writings of Resistance

Organizer: Maebh Long

From the late nineteenth century, as the public adjusted to a world of germs and microbes, a discourse of immunity gave the reassurance of bodily defences. Outside of medical journals,... more

Poetic Grammars

Organizer: Julia Bloch

In “A Grammar of Waking,” the poet Tonya Foster writes, “Hungry / and articulate / syllables // graze the / field of this page.” Metapoetically invoking units of punctuation not as sound but on a... more

Writing Literary Character(s)

Organizer: Daniel Aureliano Newman

Character is one of the trickiest of literary concepts. Most theorists agree that narrative, by definition, requires human or human-like characters, but of course characters are not really humans:... more

Figuring the Lyric Across Media

Organizer: Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth

Poetry’s complex relationship to film and television is “news that stays news:” from Chaplin discussing his desire to read Keats by an Italian lake in 1920 to T.S. Eliot references appearing in... more

Global Asias as Method

Organizer: Alya Ansari

Historically materialist procedures of reading have seemed remarkably preoccupied with the political, cultural, and economic rhythms of the Global North, and with the subjectivities produced by... more

Types and Typicality

Organizer: Dora Zhang

The great synthesis achieved by realism lies, according to Georg Lukács, in the depiction of “typical individuals in typical circumstances.” Typicality is, for him, the dialectical hinge between the... more

Glamour in Theory and Performance

Organizer: Julia Jarcho

For this year’s conference, we propose a seminar focused on the thing that drew many of us to the study of expressive forms to begin with: GLAMOUR. As total crisis accelerates, many of our... more

Solidarity Aesthetics

Organizer: Anthony Alessandrini

Does solidarity have an aesthetics? How would we recognize or define such a thing, and how might it challenge our assumptions about what art is and does? Building on Hannah Feldman and Rebecca... more

The Forgotten Forms of Contemporary Fiction

Organizer: Mitch Murray

Are there ghosts haunting the study of the contemporary? What undead forms and themes continue to shape the arts of the present, even as critics ignore or decontextualize them? This seminar invites... more

African Children’s Comparative Literature

Organizer: Tesfaye Mesele Zinabu

Seminar on children’s literature in Africa will give deep insight about trends and advances of children’ literature in Africa.  It will be a platform for attendees to have the opportunity to... more

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