Seminars

Aging and Ageisms across European Enlightenments

Organizer: Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti

Old age is less the result of a biological reality, than the by-product of a cultural and social construction. Each culture and society determines its age and rites of passage relative to specific... more

Literature and Attention

Organizer: Anne Marie Thompson

Is there a crisis of attention? Much of our contemporary experience seems to suggest so, and myriad popular books—like Jenny O’Dell’s How to Do Nothing or Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants—speak to... more

Combatting Erasure: Contemporary Cultural Production and the Recuperation of Invisibilized Memories in the Americas

Organizer: David Dulceany

Whereas histories of colonialism and neo-colonialism in the Americas traditionally privilege a patriarchal and Eurocentric gaze; contemporary cultural production performs duties of mnemonic care (... more

Environments of Global Crime Fiction

Organizer: Patrick Deer

This seminar takes the global environmental crisis – the spectre of ecological and even planetary collapse due to anthropogenic climate change – as a starting point to consider the ways that global... more

Embodied States: Conceptualizing Corporeality, Literature, and Visual Cultures in an Age of AI

Organizer: Lisa DeTora

This seminar considers embodied states in global literary and cultural forms as they may be understood in the age of AI, broadly conceived. We seek presentations that consider the stakes of AI in the... more

Performances of Witness

Organizer: Ariel Leutheusser

The subject onto whom testimony is bestowed - the secondary witness - is defined by Dori Laub as the actor who, as listener, “is party to the creation of knowledge de novo,” is thus implicated in the... more

Parasites! Parasitical Logic in Economics, Politics, and Culture

Organizer: peter hitchcock

An immense box office and review success, and particularly after winning an Oscar for Best Picture in 2020, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite has spurred significant critical debate on the prevalence of... more

Language, Finitude, and the Human: The Afterlife of Theory?

Organizer: Patrick Dove

This seminar takes up the question of what becomes of critical practices in the Humanities at a time when theory no longer holds sway in the academy. The death of theory, as we are describing it, is... more

Translation as Defiance

Organizer: Fredrik Rönnbäck

Translation theory often returns to the tension between fidelity and freedom. The inherent passivity of both these terms, however, tends to relegate translation to a subordinate role within the field... more

Exospheres: Politics, Aesthetics, and Narratives of Contemporary Outer Space

Organizer: Jessica Copley

While recourse to outer space as a site for utopian thinking has long been a familiar feature of speculative genres, the recent resurgence of interest in Russian Cosmism, enduring vitality of... more

Theory without Object: Histories and Historical Accounts

Organizer: Daniel Carranza

For a term bandied about ubiquitously and with little conceptual caution, “theory” as a discursive category exhibits a remarkably torqued development in 20th-century Western thought. The contemporary... more

World-Systems Theory and Literary Studies

Organizer: Matthew Eatough

Contemporary critical buzzwords such as “global Anglophone,” “world,” and “scale” recall Immanuel Wallerstein’s influential proposal to displace the nation-state with the world-system as a "unit" of... more

Literature and Gratitude

Organizer: Cory Stockwell

Literature and Gratitude Cory Stockwell and Alexandra Morrison If the concept of gratitude has come increasingly to the fore in recent years, it is probably in part because people find it to be... more

Writerly Worlds and Worldly Writers: Transcultural Receptions of German Literature

Organizer: Jocelyn Aksin

While recent attention to world literatures and literary worlds has shed light on the significant roles that distribution, translation, and technology play in intertwining global histories of... more

Local/Global Literatures and Cultures

Organizer: Yuji Kato

We now live in a world where local literatures and cultures cannot be separate from the global political, economic, and cultural influences that infiltrate urban and provincial areas of all regions... more

Texts in Motion: walking and literature

Organizer: Amber Bal

Across geographical regions and throughout history, walking has served as a deeply meaningful form of movement. Aristotle’s founding of the peripatetic school in 335 BC and the long tradition of... more

Relational Reckonings: Narrative and Critical Approaches to Trauma

Organizer: Kate McCullough

Our world is rife with trauma: political trauma, cultural trauma, epidemiological trauma, environmental trauma, and personal trauma, to name but a few. What does narrative offer by way of addressing... more

Black Re-Mediations in Early Canada

Organizer: Jade Ferguson

The study of Black life in early Canada inevitably raises questions about media and mediation. The conditions through which Black expression, experience, and activism is rendered historical (in “... more

The Allure of the Primitive

Organizer: Katryn Evinson

In a present marked by capitalist exhaustion and ecological collapse, we ask what underlies the return of the primitive as a collective desire. The symptoms of this desire bring together conflicting... more

Latinx Literary History as Comparative Literature

Organizer: Laura Lomas

The forthcoming three-volume book series, Latinx Literature in Transition (Cambridge University Press), introduces texts ranging from the fifteenth through the twenty-first century, and drawing upon... more

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