Seminars

East Asian War Films

Organizer: (Aaron) Feng Lan

The most unforgettable events marking the modern histories of East Asian countries such as China, Korea, and Japan are perhaps the series of military conflicts, ranging from civil wars to regional... more

Dante Beyond Western Culture: Translation, Transcultural Heritage, and Reception of the "Commedia"

Organizer: Benedetta Cutolo

T.S. Eliot considered Dante to be his stylistic and existential model and his Commedia a fundamental reading for the appreciation of modern poetry in any language. He maintained that Dante... more

Translation Ecologies

Organizer: Isabel Gómez

How do translation practice and multilingual knowledge production inform and shape notions of sustainability, justice, security, and relationality between languages and cultures in the modern and... more

Enfolded Temporalities and Creative Anachronisms in Speculative Fiction

Organizer: Jon Pitt

This seminar is interested in what from the past and the present survives into speculative futures. As writers, filmmakers, and comic artists imagine the shape of things to come, what do they decide... more

Queer Kinship in World Literature

Organizer: Anchit Sathi

This seminar seeks to shine the spotlight on non-heteronormative forms of kinship in world literature. To this end, it will explore and interrogate such relationships to highlight the nuanced ways in... more

Cities in Dispute: Modern Cultures and the Urban Margins

Organizer: Luigi Patruno

Spurred on by the labor market and government actions and born out of rapid city expansion, settler colonialism, and human impact on the environment, marginalized experiences of dwelling pose a... more

Sensing Migrant Romanticism

Organizer: Tanvi Solanki

In his influential study of Romanticism, M. H. Abrams famously claimed that radical aesthetic novelties “frequently turn out to be migrant ideas which, in their native intellectual habitat, were... more

Bersani and Art

Organizer: Colin Buist

Leo Bersani’s work is frequently cited in queer theory and literary studies on questions of sociality, sexuality, and intimacy. Curiously unexplored, however, is Bersani’s career-long engagement with... more

Racial Capitalism and Migration

Organizer: Eleanor Paynter

First used by Marxist South African scholars and activists in the 1970s and taken up by Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (1992), “racial capitalism” underscores how capitalism is fundamentally... more

Tropes of Adventure

Organizer: Manuel Mühlbacher

In contemporary Western culture, the term ‘adventure’ seems to be applicable to almost everything. While the ‘adventure appeal’ is an advertising strategy that can be projected on even the most... more

Let's Talk About Poems

Organizer: Natalia Cecire

How do we talk about poems? While disciplines such as musicology and art history have grappled directly with the ways that making art works tractable as objects of study has involved wresting them... more

Thinking Small

Organizer: Akshya Saxena

Why think small in comparative literary studies? As a discipline, comparative literature is expansive. It shuns critical and political parochialism by looking beyond national and regional boundaries... more

Documentary Poetics of the Hemispheric Americas

Organizer: Whitney DeVos

Mark Nowak has influentially described "documentary poetics" as "not so much a movement as a modality within poetry," a range of practices "along a continuum from the first person auto-ethnographic... more

Approaches to Madness, (Ab)normality, and Power in Literature and Culture

Organizer: Linda Istanbulli

In his foundational work History of Madness, Michel Foucault traces the unstable journey of the notion of madness in Western thought, underscoring the ways in which it was historically (re)fashioned... more

The Family and Memory

Organizer: Catrina de Rivera

This seminar explores the complex relationship between the family and remembrance: what kinds of memories are exposed or, conversely, omitted, in texts or films about the family? To what extent can... more

Literature and Political Imagination: Defeats, Resistance, and Alternative Futures

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

Knowledge Construction of Art and Literature in Social Sites and Media

Organizer: Jayshree Singh

The height of artifice is now replaced with equipment free aspect of reality i.e. the technology has over ridden the space of illusionary art. The foreign, virtual substance of equipment namely... more

Theories and Practices of Empathy Across the World

Organizer: Saumya Lal

This seminar explores conceptions of empathy in various philosophical, cultural, and linguistic traditions across the world. The English word “empathy,” adapted from the German einfühlung and closely... more

Capital I Today

Organizer: Andrew Parker

A new edition and English translation of Marx's Das Kapital I, the first in nearly a half century, will appear later this year from Princeton University Press. To mark the occasion as a Comparative... more

Waning Internationalisms: Attachments, Interfaces, Dispersals

Organizer: Leah Feldman

The twentieth century was a century of internationalisms—from the second international’s alliance against fascism at the beginning of the century to the aligned and non-aligned anti-colonial,... more

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