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Seminars

Literature and Attention

Organizer: Anne Marie Thompson

Is there a crisis of attention? Much of our contemporary experience seems to suggest so, and myriad popular books—like Jenny O’Dell’s How to Do Nothing or Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants—speak to... more

Environments of Global Crime Fiction

Organizer: Patrick Deer

This seminar takes the global environmental crisis – the spectre of ecological and even planetary collapse due to anthropogenic climate change – as a starting point to consider the ways that global... more

Performances of Witness

Organizer: Ariel Leutheusser

The subject onto whom testimony is bestowed - the secondary witness - is defined by Dori Laub as the actor who, as listener, “is party to the creation of knowledge de novo,” is thus implicated in the... more

Translation as Defiance

Organizer: Fredrik Rönnbäck

Translation theory often returns to the tension between fidelity and freedom. The inherent passivity of both these terms, however, tends to relegate translation to a subordinate role within the field... more

World-Systems Theory and Literary Studies

Organizer: Matthew Eatough

Contemporary critical buzzwords such as “global Anglophone,” “world,” and “scale” recall Immanuel Wallerstein’s influential proposal to displace the nation-state with the world-system as a "unit" of... more

Literature and Gratitude

Organizer: Cory Stockwell

Literature and Gratitude Cory Stockwell and Alexandra Morrison If the concept of gratitude has come increasingly to the fore in recent years, it is probably in part because people find it to be... more

Local/Global Literatures and Cultures

Organizer: Yuji Kato

We now live in a world where local literatures and cultures cannot be separate from the global political, economic, and cultural influences that infiltrate urban and provincial areas of all regions... more

Texts in Motion: walking and literature

Organizer: Amber Bal

Across geographical regions and throughout history, walking has served as a deeply meaningful form of movement. Aristotle’s founding of the peripatetic school in 335 BC and the long tradition of... more

Black Re-Mediations in Early Canada

Organizer: Jade Ferguson

The study of Black life in early Canada inevitably raises questions about media and mediation. The conditions through which Black expression, experience, and activism is rendered historical (in “... more

The Allure of the Primitive

Organizer: Katryn Evinson

In a present marked by capitalist exhaustion and ecological collapse, we ask what underlies the return of the primitive as a collective desire. The symptoms of this desire bring together conflicting... more

Latinx Literary History as Comparative Literature

Organizer: Laura Lomas

The forthcoming three-volume book series, Latinx Literature in Transition (Cambridge University Press), introduces texts ranging from the fifteenth through the twenty-first century, and drawing upon... more

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