Seminars

Please select a seminar for which you would like to propose a paper. Current ACLA guidelines specify that each ACLA member may submit only ONE PAPER for consideration. Abstracts must be received by Sunday, October 31, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

Exilic Subjectivities in Arabic Literature: Belonging and Estrangement, Sec. 1

Organizer: Jonas Elbousty

This seminar aims to bring together scholars with an interest in examining exilic subjectivities, with a particular focus on how the concepts of belonging and estrangement have been explored in... more

The Seventies in Comparison; or, the Uses of Periodization

Organizer: Yu-ting Huang

The seventies is not the most famous global decade. It is rarely referred to in the same way that Frederic Jameson and Chris Connery periodize the world sixties, and it seems to recede behind the... more

Parallel Worlds: The Politics of Paranoid Solidarity

Organizer: Andres Matlock

Freud claimed that the paranoid subject “recapture[s] a relation, and often a very intense one, to the people and things in the world.” This seminar is interested in paranoia’s intense... more

Boundaries Marked and Crossed: Modernism and Realism of the Global South

Organizer: Shuang Shen

With the “realism war” (Jed Esty, 2016) [and "modernism war" in the other bloc] of the Cold War period in mind, this panel invites colleagues to rethink and transcend the antinomies of modernism and... more

The Elemental and the Formless

Organizer: Oliver Aas

This seminar departs from the idea that we need a clearer understanding of elemental forms—traditional and non-traditional—that are in different stages of becoming formless (loss, disappearance,... more

Poetic and Political Readings of Virginia Woolf in Other Accents

Organizer: Nicea Nogueira

The Brazilian organizers invite scholars working in non-hegemonic countries to present their researches on Virginia Woolf’s writings. From postcolonial to decolonial studies, Woolf’s imperative voice... more

Period Genres

Organizer: Cheng-Chai Chiang

Genre has been marshalled by scholars in recent years to unscript and rewrite literary histories, whether by tracking the stability and mutations of formal conventions to historicize the present, or... more

Aesthetic Alliances as a Model of Intercontinental Resistance: Afro-Jewish-Arab Solidarity and Beyond

Organizer: Linda Istanbulli

Increasingly, the situation in Israel/Palestine has become a central nexus for comparative investigations, examining not only the intersected modalities of racialization, democratic disintegration,... more

Literature and Global Responsibility

Organizer: Stefano Bellin

Many of the problems of today’s world are global in nature and scope, and thus need to be approached in a global fashion. Yet, as the reaction to the current pandemic shows, we struggle to think and... more

“Dark Satanic Mills” : On Literary and Industrial Production

Organizer: Angus Reid

In 1804 William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic Mills” of the Industrial Revolution, poetically marking a key moment in the emergence of capitalism, while staging the mill as a site of its critique... more

Black Pacific(s): Afro-Asian cultural exchanges between Asia and the Americas

Organizer: Ninel Valderrama-Negrón

Works like Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993), Peter and David O’Neill edited collection The Black and Green Atlantic (2009), and Weaver's Jace The Red Atlantic (2009) illustrate how the... more

The Enigma of Karl Lagerfeld

Organizer: Christophe Koné

It’s not even been three years since Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld died in February 2019 and already several serious biographies by respected journalists have come out in France: Kaiser... more

Experimental Form, Experimental Thought?

Organizer: Aili Pettersson Peeker

Today, experiments about how humans think usually take place in a lab, allowing researchers to locate thought processes in the brain with unprecedented precision. However, writers have experimented... more

Free Education, Comparatively

Organizer: Rei Terada

Over two sessions, this panel asks how to think and learn otherwise than through the contemporary university's financial structures and myriad forms of unfreedom. More than ten years down the line... more

ACLA Undergraduate Seminar: “Representing Crisis”, Sec. 1

Organizer: Nicoletta Pireddu

Since ancient times, literature and other aesthetic forms have engaged with various manifestations of crisis, from social revolutions and wars, personal and family struggles, economic recessions and... more

The “Geo” turn in Translation Studies

Organizer: Saswati Saha

Space and spatiality have been significant coordinates in the study of translation in the West. The concept has long been included in humanities and social sciences too by scholars like Edward Soja (... more

Translation as Transformation: accessing literatures across languages oral and written

Organizer: Christi Merrill

We are interested in papers that theorize the practical experiences of embodied readers in efforts to resist essentialist, universalizing modes of perception. While in our recent collaboration we... more

Thinking Utopia’s Limits: Dystopian Affect and French Cultural Production

Organizer: Andrew Billing

The premise for the seminar is that in 2021-2022 the utopian tradition that energized earlier generations of artists, writers, intellectuals and other cultural figures in France and in many other... more

Orientation in and through Texts

Organizer: Reinhard G. Mueller

Orientation in and through Texts Organized on behalf of the Hodges Foundation for Philosophical Orientation How do we orient ourselves to texts? And how do texts orientate us? How do texts shape the... more

Refuge, Asylum, and Reconstructions of Home and Homeland, Sec. 1

Organizer: Mohammed Kadalah

The past decade has witnessed the onset of several, converging refugee crises across the globe due to armed conflict, genocide, political oppression, or economic survival. Whether they are... more

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