Seminars

Vice-Presidential Seminar: Why Psychoanalysis?

Organizer: Ranji Khanna

This seminar explores psychoanalysis and the question of comparison as the thinking across different spheres (difference, metaphor, analogy, dyad, sinthome, migration, translation, theoria... more

Performing Protest – Contesting Russia’s Nationalism, Sec. 2

Organizer: Yana Meerzon

In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Women in Black, a transnational feminist anti-war resistance movement, staged a powerful anti-war... more

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age, Sec. 2

Organizer: B. Venkat Mani

The aim of this seminar is to spark a discussion on the significance of literary comparisons in and for the twenty-first century. With David Damrosch's Comparing the Literatures (2020) at its center... more

Human Rights Literature and the Politics of Responsibility, Sec. 2

Organizer: Arielle Stambler

In recent decades, human rights have risen to prominence as a “dominant discourse for addressing issues of social justice” (Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore 2012, 4). Scholars have demonstrated... more

Literature and Political Imagination: Defeats, Resistance, and Alternative Futures, Sec. 2

Organizer: Stefano Bellin

We live in a world that seems to have largely lost faith in politics and the dialectic of history. Our “horizons of expectation” are remarkably narrow or naïve, if existent at all. In the regime of... more

The Embodied Turn: (Digital) Affordances for Empirical Research on (Postcolonial) Narrative Genres

Organizer: Saskia Schabio

This seminar explores implications of the ‘embodied turn’ (cf. Hillesund, Schilhab, Mangen: 2022) and New Materialism (cf. Barad 2013) for the comparative, empirical study of (postcolonial) narrative... more

Going Beyond the Literary II: Caribbean Interdisciplinarity

Organizer: Kavita Singh

This seminar follows on a previous ACLA seminar where Caribbean studies scholars presented work that went beyond traditional literary analyses to engage ethnographic, linguistic, historical, artistic... more

Between Written and Oral Traditions: Revealing the Literary Tradition of the Spoken Voice

Organizer: Michal Peles Almagor

This seminar aims to offer new perspectives on the relations and tensions between oral and written traditions in Jewish modernity and beyond. In studying modern Jewish literature and thought,... more

Modernist Extra-Cinematic Montage

Organizer: Nikita Allgire

Although entering the English language in the late 1920s by way of early theories of cinema and the art of the European Modernist avant-garde, the conceptual and historical trajectories of montage... more

Inhuman Voices: Writing and the Non-Human

Organizer: Katharina Simon

Time and again, literature has reflected on its non-human origins in scenes of writing and invocation. In “Autobiography as De-facement,” de Man conceptualizes prosopopeia as the mechanism in which... more

Mapping Memories of Violence: Role of Visual Texts in Mnemopolitics

Organizer: Ragini Chakraborty

American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White documented the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust through her lens in 1945 and also captured the brutality of border politics and mass migration of the... more

Genre Theory Today

Organizer: Martin Aagaard Jensen

Scholars have turned to genre as both method and topic in recent years. It has arisen as a heuristic for literary sociologists, feminist critics and race theorists. At the same time, critics observe... more

Human Rights Literature and the Politics of Responsibility, Sec. 1

Organizer: Arielle Stambler

Gendered Memories and Posthuman Embodiments in Reimagined Past and Alternative Futures

Organizer: Wendy Sun

This panel invites interdisciplinary perspectives from memory studies, gender studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism, analyzing modern literature and film. We examine how memories rigorously shape... more

Re-Thinking Transgression: Cultural Critique, Art Theory, and the Emergence of the Historic Avant-gardes

Organizer: Brais Outes-Leon

Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the literary and artistic practices of the historic avant-gardes were surrounded by a robust production of art criticism and journalism that engaged with these new... more

Towards

Organizer: Nicholas Brady

Afropessimism is one name given to a recent movement in thought to consider blackness as a singular condition that throws the categories of the modern world into crisis at the same time as it... more

Political Implications of the Poetics of Philosophy

Organizer: Osman Nemli

Following world shattering social and political events in the 20th century, philosophy’s ability to be an adequate or efficacious discipline to change, let alone interpret, the world was brought into... more

Forms of Attention

Organizer: Jennifer Reimer

Recent scholarship has placed renewed, and updated, focus on the question of aesthetic form. Building on that focus, this panel asks: how can aesthetic form produce or enable modes of attention, and... more

The Analog Revisited: Questioning the Technical Image in a Digital Age, Again

Organizer: Renee C. Hoogland

In Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Vilém Flusser defines images as “significant surfaces” that “make comprehensible” something “out there” in the four dimensions of space and time; images... more

Narratives, Media, Heterogeneity, and Asian Diaspora

Organizer: Liyang Dong

This panel seminar seeks to provide a space for discussion on scholarship regarding marginalized or erased narratives on heterogeneous and hybridized identities in relation to race, gender, class,... more

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