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Seminars

The Literature of Plasticity

Organizer: Tyler Williams

Catherine Malabou places her signature concept of “plasticity” within the material encounters between the Kantian, Hegelian, and Derridean threads of the continental philosophical tradition and... more

Southern Concepts

Organizer: Julia Ng

Too often, the history of critical theory has been written as one of the afterlife of the European Enlightenment, the reach of its ideas measured by their applicability to local contexts or to area... more

The South Asian Diaspora: Dynamics of Change

Organizer: Medha Bhattacharyya

Diaspora ”has broadly come to mean all people who have a particular country of origin but live outside it either due to the 'pull' or 'push' factor. According to James Clifford, the diaspora is a “... more

The Ends of Art

Organizer: Robert Lehman

This seminar seeks philosophically and historically informed reflections on the end of art—not only in the sense of art’s terminus but also in the sense of art’s aim or ... more

Modernism Beyond Borders

Organizer: Thais Rutledge

In All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman says, “[t]o be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth transformation of ourselves and the... more

The Eclipse of the Subcontinental Imagination

Organizer: Anustup Basu

The current age is witnessing the passing of generations with palpable or immediately inherited memories of a wider cultural cosmology of pre-Partition South Asia. That is, not just in terms of... more

A Cinematic Internationalism? Reframing World Cinema

Organizer: Michael Allan

A remarkable passage of Vachel Lindsay’s 1915 The Art of the Moving Picture describes cinema  as “a delineation of the world” in which “Pekin and China, Harvard and Massachusetts, Portland and... more

Revolutionary Ecologies: Literature, Theory, Praxis

Organizer: Alexander Sorenson

In recent decades, figures from the scholarly domains of literary, cultural, and eco-criticism, as well as from the public sphere, have advanced a number of approaches to environmental subjects that... more

Poetics & the Anthropocene

Organizer: Keith Mikos

Narratives of catastrophe, dystopia, and global extinction have long been meaningful literary subgenres, each of which has become increasingly central to literary study in response to the unavoidable... more

Anti-Historicism

Organizer: Benjamin Schreier

Much has been written about our discipline’s post-theory age. Some lament the passing of theory, many more celebrate it, and quite a few others have devoted their professional energies to... more

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