Seminars

Diagrams of writing. Design, ekphrastic and figural patterns in artistic and literary forms

Organizer: Thomas Symeonidis

Contemporary debates and research continue to investigate the various interrelations between the arts. “Communication”, “exchanges”, “encounters” between the arts, “interdisciplinarity”, “... more

Labor in Global Speculative Fiction

Organizer: Samuel Ginsburg

In their construction of possible futures and alternate realities, science fiction and other forms of speculative literature have often provided a space to reflect on the cultural and technological... more

After Caliban: Literary Education, Empire, and the “Global Anglophone”

Organizer: Laura Ritland

This seminar invites renewed analysis and debate about the educational institutions of English literature within the scope of British and US empire, especially (though not only) within the light of... more

Anti-Fascist Worldmaking

Organizer: Jessy Bell

Umberto Eco’s now-famed essay “Ur-Fascism” (1995) outlines fourteen characteristics of what he calls “Eternal Fascism,” noting that fascistic ways of thinking and cultural mores pulse with or without... more

The Flow of Performing Arts Between Periphery and Center: Tensions and Potentialities

Organizer: Carlos Gontijo Rosa

In 1931, Antonin Artaud envisioned a radically innovative form of theatre after witnessing a performance by a Balinese troupe at the Colonial Exposition in Paris. While this event is widely... more

Hegel and World Literature

Organizer: Carson Welch

The specter of Hegel looms large over contemporary scholarship. Debunking overhasty dismissals of Hegelian thought as vulgar panlogism or reductive teleology, recent work has presented Hegel as a... more

New Directions in Temporality Studies: Time and the Construction of the Racialized Gendered Subject

Organizer: Liz Rose

In the opening of Unpayable Debt (2022), Denise Ferreira Da Silva turns toward the temporality of modernity and its racialized gendered others, asking, “How to break this perverse circuitry” (13).... more

Remembering the Future: (Re)Constructing Memory and Realities in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and the Balkans

Organizer: Thomas Jesus Garza

In Goodbye, Lenin (2003), the young hero Alex Kërner struggles to recreate the daily life of East German in his apartment to preserve the familiar and comforting environment of pre-unification Berlin... more

Postcolonial South-Asia: Interrogating Identities/Experiences

Organizer: Chinmay Pandharipande

In the Humanities, South Asia is usually understood as a set of plurilingual, multicultural nations. Each constituting nation is internally differentiated or socially stratified according to its... more

Literary Ruins: On the Crisis of Contemporary Institutions

Organizer: Daniel Runnels

This seminar will address the question of the ruinous state of contemporary institutions which have historically upheld liberalism and, broadly speaking, the coordinates of political modernity.... more

Collective Narratives and the Critical Medical Humanities

Organizer: Marta-Laura Cenedese

The illness narrative might arguably be the most prominent genre within medical and health humanities research, and the “narrative turn” of the 1990s certainly contributed to the rise of scholarship... more

Surplus Labour and World-Literature

Organizer: Josh Jewell

For Brazilian critic Antonio Candido, literature has the potential to grasp the peculiar “social dynamic” of a time and place (85). In other words, literary form has the ability to articulate social... more

Translation and Chinese/Sinophone/Sinitic Poetry

Organizer: Lucas Klein

China is, they say, a “nation of poetry.” Though poetry has been and remains important to the Chinese cultural identity, the statement can also be interrogated: what is “China”? what is a “nation”?... more

Sex Negativity II (We Have Never Had Sex)

Organizer: Marija Cetinic

Sex Negativity II (We Have Never Had Sex) Continuing from the 2023 Sex Negativity seminar in Chicago, this panel thinks through sex and negativity in relation to psychoanalytic theories of the... more

The Turks and Their Native Tongues: The Role of Literature, Media and the Arts in Their Healing/Túrúkler hem Onlarnîñ Ana Tíllerí: Bolarnîñ Șifasî úșún Edebiyatîñ, Mediyanîñ we Sanatlarîñ Yerí

Organizer: Taner Murat

For hundreds of years, the conquest and colonization from Eastern Europe to the Far East subjected the Turkish ethnic groups to permanent linguicide by their dominant others. At the beginning of the... more

Technicity and the Genesis of the Posthuman World in Literature, Film, Performance, Computational Media, and Critical Theory

Organizer: Jecheol Park

Although Heidegger proclaimed that the essence of technology is a bringing-forth or revealing (poiesis) of the world, he did not articulate what kind of world or whose world it brings forth. Given... more

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