Seminars

Documenting Revolution in Latin America

Organizer: Daniella Gitlin

Again and again, revolutions run up against representation trouble. Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that the Haitian Revolution “entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable... more

Hermeneutics in/as Revision

Organizer: Ariel Lawrence

Hermeneutics—a term historically associated with biblical and/or philosophical exegesis—contends with the theory, method, and practice of interpretation regarding all manner of language, literature,... more

The Ends of Comparison: Global Engagement, Asymmetries, and Relationality across Asia

Organizer: Alvin K. Wong

In the past decade, comparative literature scholars have increasingly argued for the importance of making visible the various historical entanglements, encounters, and networks of relationality... more

Reimagining Asian-Hispanic Synergies in Literature, Culture, and Film

Organizer: Miaowei Weng

The dynamic interplay between Asian and Hispanic cultures has yielded a rich tapestry of shared experiences, cultural exchanges, and historical dialogues. This panel, titled "Reimagining Asian-... more

Orientation via Texts: From Antiquity to AI

Organizer: Reinhard Mueller

How do we orient ourselves to texts across time and technological advancements? How do texts orientate us, how do they transform us? How do texts shape the world that we orient ourselves in? How do... more

Rethinking Literature and Evil: Comparative French and Francophone Perspectives

Organizer: Andrew Billing

This seminar’s purpose is to explore literary works on “evil” from a comparative perspective. It invites papers on evil in French and Francophone literature from all regions and periods, as well as... more

The Atmospheres of Nuance

Organizer: Jeffrey Peters

We are today often told that ours is a media landscape of rigid binarisms, of Manichean oppositions, of entrenched, increasingly violent confrontations. What better time than now to ask questions... more

Poetry and Resistance in Contemporary Asia: Dissent in the Age of Pseudo-democracy

Organizer: William Arighi

The February 1, 2021, coup in Myanmar encapsulates in some ways an era in which Asian governments appear to be backsliding on democratic hopes. The promise of transparency and accountability that was... more

The Practice Turn: Reconstruction and Critical Making

Organizer: Sean Silver

The Practice Turn: Reconstruction and Critical Making In his 2004 essay The Production of Presence, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht... more

Unredeemable Worlds: Environmentalism Beyond Salvation

Organizer: Antoine Traisnel

Who could argue with the plea to “save the planet”? From efforts to safeguard planetary resources in biobanks against the existential threats posed by climate change or other extinction events to the... more

Euphrase Kezilahabi’s Kiswahili Poetics: In Translation and in the Global South Curriculum

Organizer: Ludwig Schmitz

In surveys of modern Kiswahili literature, Tanzanian novelist, scholar, and poet Euphrase Kezilahabi is generally described as a singularity in terms of his literary ambitions. Between the social-... more

Proof

Organizer: Moyang (Moya) Li

What forms of proof surface in literary fiction? Colloquially, proof is often understood as incontrovertible evidence of a thing or event, as the strongest form of evidence. Yet in pure math it... more

Space, Architecture, and Violence across Literature and Media

Organizer: Michael Turcios

In recent years, a burgeoning body of literature and media has revisited how space and architecture normalize violence. Building on the foundational insights of Michel Foucault, who examined how... more

Visual and Lingual Worlds as Seen Online: (Re)Structuring Gender through Lifestyle Vlogs and Videos

Organizer: Iqra Shagufta Cheema

This seminar aims to delve into the intricate intersections between gender, language, digital media, and postcolonialism around gender in postcolonial communities and countries. With lifestyle... more

Speculative Fiction and Work: Histories, Futures and Resilience

Organizer: Zita Hüsing

This panel traces the interconnected histories and futures of labor and their affected vulnerable populations as well as their resilience. In a post-pandemic era the definition of work has undergone... more

Assembling Sounds

Organizer: John Melillo

ASSEMBLING SOUNDS Organizer: John Melillo Co-Organizer: Michael Nardone In this seminar, we propose to concentrate on sound's expansiveness as a mechanism for producing various, fleeting, and... more

Language memoirs & linguistic autobiographies: the multilingual subject's self-narrative in comparative literature today

Organizer: Louise Sampagnay

This seminar seeks to explore whether self-narratives dealing with multilingualism are likely to challenge the heuristic foundations of comparative studies. If ‘multilingual subjects’ (Kramsch 2006)... more

Korea and its Other Worlds: Korean Literature in Transnational Comparative Work

Organizer: Melissa S. Karp

This seminar invites scholars working on the media of Korea and at least one other region to discuss the challenges of comparative approaches to Korean literature and culture as they emerge in our... more

Ecological (In)hospitality in the 20th and 21st century

Organizer: Alberto Tondello

Ambiguous and paradoxical, the concept of hospitality has been extensively explored in its social, political, and ethical dimensions. In his cycle of seminars on hospitality (1995-97), Jacques... more

Warring With Infrastructure: Critical Reflections on Building and Collapse

Organizer: Deena Dinat

South Africa is understood to be in a state of infrastructural collapse: electrical grids, water systems, and roads all face existential crises triggered by the rapid criminal neoliberalization of... more

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