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Seminars

Archives of the Planetary

Organizer: Christine Xiong

Édouard Glissant, in Poetics of Relation (1990), famously emphasizes that “Cultures develop in a single planetary space but to different ‘times.’ It would be impossible to determine either a real... more

Nonfiction: A Global South Genre

Organizer: Haider Shahbaz

Literary studies in the fields of anticolonialism, postcolonialism, and the Global South often focus on fictional genres, especially novels. While it is important to pay attention to fiction, this... more

Whither "Relation"?

Organizer: Ren Ellis Neyra

In 1939, Aimé Césaire wrote in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: “And this land screamed for centuries that we are bestial brutes; that the human pulse [les pulsations de l’humanité] stops at the... more

(Dis)embodied Forms

Organizer: Mehak Khan

By all accounts, we are living in a new age of form in literary criticism: the last decade has seen a slew of monographs, articles, and special issues devoted to what Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid... more

Violence and Literary Form

Organizer: Lily Gurton-Wachter

This seminar investigates how literary form engages with and responds to violence, and how violence shapes literary form. We conceive of violence broadly, and we encourage papers that examine its... more

Radical Medeas

Organizer: Zina Giannopoulou

Medea has captured the attention and imagination of artists and audiences in multiple media at least since the earliest extant literature of ancient Greece. She is at once a woman, a daughter, a wife... more

Temporalities of Memory

Organizer: Michael McGillen

A key challenge facing memory studies, despite its central role in interdisciplinary humanities work over the past 30 years, is how the field can survive in the face of a contemporary culture whose “... more

Melancholia

Organizer: Divya Menon

What is melancholia? Is it an illness, a temperament, a mood, or something else altogether? The word derives from the classical Greek for black bile, the bodily humor ancients considered the cause of... more

Feminist and Gender Literature

Organizer: Ahmed Hussein Joudah Alboabdullah

يعتبر الأدب النسوي إحدى الظواهر الأدبية الحديثة في الساحة الأدبية والنقدية، إذ أنه يركز على المسائل النسوية وقضايا المرأة التحررية، وقد شغلت مسألة الكتابة النسوية حيزا هاما في الدراسات النقدية، ومن... more

Narrating the Biosphere: Of Plants and Animals

Organizer: Keijiro Suga

The earth is commonly said to be shaped by the four elements. But it also depends on the biosphere: the region on, above, and below the Earth's surface where life exists, a narrow zone in which soil... more

The Rhetoric of Value

Organizer: Sam Samore

Value-theoretical readings of Marx have become increasingly popular in the humanities. For some literary critics, value criticism has brought about a new approach to social objectivity via “real... more

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