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Seminars

Book Censorship and the Politics of Literature

Organizer: Johs Rasmussen

During the last obscenity trial involving a text-only medium in the United States, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that William Burrough’s novel Naked Lunch (1959) was “not... more

Realism, Globalization, and Cosmopolis

Organizer: Didier COSTE

This seminar addresses questions about realism’s aesthetic and political implications from a global perspective. The genre of the novel is said to have spread all over the world at the time of the... more

Poetics? Now?

Organizer: Judah Rubin

As we rapidly approach the 1/4 mark of the century a number of calls for papers have asked writers to consider the past 25 years in literature in a bid to periodize from autofiction to vis-po. Yet it... more

Sensation and/as Method

Organizer: Yanbing Er

This seminar seeks to explore the ways in which sensation works as a critical method in relation to modes of reading and writing. Our goal is to uncover new practices of knowing and knowledge-making... more

Translating the Caribbean

Organizer: Simona Bertacco

Heterolingualism is one of the defining characteristics of literature in the Caribbean, as authors switch between languages and language varieties in unique and organic ways. The Caribbean region in... more

Between Worlds and Worldlessness

Organizer: Roland Vegso

Over the last few decades, the concept of the “world” has reemerged as one of the most unsettling theoretical problems for contemporary thought. Our historical moment appears to be defined by a... more

Global Legal Imagination

Organizer: Adam Schoene

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination, in which he interrogates the possibilities and limitations of law and its relationship with language and... more

Strict Scrutiny: Interpretation, Norms, (In)Justice

Organizer: Rebecca Saunders

Prompted by the spate of alarming decisions recently handed down by SCOTUS (Trump v. U.S., Fischer, Garland, cases overturning Chevron) and the motley combination of interpretative methods (... more

Ecology, Ecstasy, Mysticism

Organizer: Alexander Sorenson

How should Spring bring forth a garden on hard stone? Become earth, that you may grow flowers of many colors. —Rumi The soul is all things. She has being with the stones and growing with the trees... more

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