Seminars

Broken Middles

Organizer: George Mather

Against the backdrop of a 21st-century addicted to ‘origins’ and ‘ends,’ this seminar uses the work of Gillian Rose (1947-1995) to explore the possibilities of ‘the broken middle’. Contemporary... more

Incompossible Islands: Thinking the Fictional, the Real and the Virtual in Times of Ecocide

Organizer: Maria Boletsi

Climate change is no longer experienced as temporary rupture but as a chronic condition entwined with sociopolitical and economic processes such as global inequality, populism, racism, wars,... more

Mimetic Studies: New Theoretical Steps for the Mimetic (Re-)Turn

Organizer: Nidesh Lawtoo

Located at the juncture of philosophy and the arts, mimesis is one of the most ancient concepts of literary theory and may not initially appear new, let alone original. It was indeed marginalized and... more

Postcolonial Formalism in Context

Organizer: Arthur Rose

This seminar asks how we might integrate context as a formal category of postcolonial literature. We invite submissions that theorize and/or practice modes of criticism that read postcolonial culture... more

Beyond the Capitals of Decadence

Organizer: Florian Zappe

Beyond the Capitals of Decadence Since antiquity, the elusive concept of ‘decadence’—regardless whether defined as a socio-cultural phenomenon, an artistic movement, or as an aesthetic programme—... more

Aesthetic Experience, Reading Practices and Literary Studies: Functions and Uses of Literature

Organizer: Tijana Przulj

The idea that literature has a particular and inimitable effect on the individual is hardly new. Whether it supports spiritual and cultural development or provides the individual with structures that... more

(Be)longing; nostalgia and the construction of ideology

Organizer: Hannah Link

In How Societies Remember (1989), Paul Connerton writes that the present “distort[s]” the past, and vice-versa, in our collective memory” (2). These distortions can be instrumentalised by politicians... more

(Un)Easy Entanglements: Agency, Alliances, and Affinities of Translators and Language Teachers

Organizer: Shane Carreon

Situated at the locus of power relations in and through language, translators and language teachers are entwined by and within complex ideologies, epistemologies, and governing policies. In... more

Authenticity

Organizer: David Seamans

Authenticity can be understood as a substance or point, no matter how apparently marginal, that persists universally and ahistorically. It takes only one such point to stake an ontology and a stable... more

The Person in Law & Culture

Organizer: Jeannine DeLombard

The person is one of Western culture’s most enduring legal and literary forms. According to the origin story recounted by everyone from Thomas Hobbes to Hannah Arendt to Roberto Esposito, the Latin... more

World Literature and Disappearance

Organizer: Joseph Wager

Enforced disappearance has become a lingua franca of transitional-justice processes around the world. Reflecting the experiences of Latin American dictatorships, this crime is defined by arbitrary... more

Writing as a form of struggle: critical and philosophical perspectives

Organizer: Samuel Holmertz

How is the practice of writing a form of struggle? How does struggle elucidate the aesthetic and/or political impetus of a written work? Struggle is often ever-present in the experience of writing:... more

Cultures of Energy Transition

Organizer: Martin Premoli

“Energy transition isn’t a choice. It’s not a matter of whether we transition or not — there’s no ‘if’ involved. We will have to transition. The question is whether we are able to successfully do so... more

Photographic Practices of Repair

Organizer: Candela Marini

Photography's complicity in the destruction of diverse worlds has become a central concern for scholars, artists, and activists engaged in the dismantling of imperial ways of thinking, while also... more

Public Environmental Humanities

Organizer: Yanoula Athanassakis

Public *Environmental* Humanities This seminar invites proposals on public scholarship and engagement originating from – or related to – the environmental humanities. The desire to be in... more

Is there a past? The “Off-Modern” Gaze & Reinscriptions of the Lost in Mediterranean & Southern European Cultures

Organizer: Paula Perez-Rodriguez

How have literature and other forms of verbal arts reckoned with the loss –both real and perceived– of peoples, communities, and cultures, historically? How is such loss transcribed, reread, and to... more

Narrative Fracture in East and Southeast Asian Art and Literature

Organizer: Dr. Taylor Roberts

This session wishes to examine the concept of fracture as it relates to art and literature from East Southeast Asia and the diaspora. A central line of inquiry is to engage how poets, filmmakers,... more

Arabic Literature, or The Ancient in the Modern

Organizer: Kevin Blankinship

“It would appear,” wrote Syrian poet Adunis in his Introduction to Arab Poetics, “that the return to the ancient has been more eagerly pursued whenever the internal conflict has intensified, or the... more

Picturing Violence in the Age of Annihilation

Organizer: Elizabeth Liendo

Violence—and the challenge it presents to representation—is a black hole at the heart of narrative. Textual, film, news media, and artistic narratives all must confront the question of how to... more

Disciplinary Affects: The Aesthetics of Systemic Injustices

Organizer: Esther Edelmann

This seminar examines how institutional practices of exclusion and marginalization shape cultural perceptions of the outcast and outlaw, appealing primarily to emotional responses rather than... more

ACLA