Seminars

From Fait Divers to “Fake News”: Fictions of Race Between Mass Media and Literature

Organizer: Olivia Harrison

The status of truth in journalism is an object of growing attention and concern. One of many common strategies of mis- and dis-information is the amplification and distortion of minor news stories... more

Cardinal Points: Literatures of the Global South

Organizer: Alfred Lopez

To fly from Mexico City to New Delhi, one must make one or two stops in Europe; perhaps Schiphol or Munich. To read Rabindranath Thakur in Spanish, this volume’s editors must likewise ‘stop’ in... more

The Politics of Legibility, Lateness, Liberation

Organizer: Jorge Cartaya

Co-organized by Daimys Garcia (dagarcia@wooster.edu), Jorge Cartaya (jec454@cornell.edu), Ana Luszczynska (luszczyn@fiu.edu) This seminar explores the tension in registers of legibility and... more

After Weltliteratur: Practices of Philology and Literary Criticism in the long 19th Century

Organizer: Benjamin Heller

When Goethe introduced the concept of ‘world literature’ around 1827, he labeled the practices of literary studies and literary criticism that German Romanticism had propagated and realized since the... more

Fragments for a History of the Legal Body

Organizer: Julie Stone Peters

Our era knows, perhaps better than any, that law’s construction of the human body matters: to our identities, freedom, subsistence, and much more. Law tells us what body parts we may display and what... more

Infrastructural Verse

Organizer: Michael Martin Shea

If the infrastructural turn in literary studies has found its privileged object in the novel (realist or otherwise), the history of poetic representations of infrastructure—from “Crossing Brooklyn... more

Eating your words: reception as consumption

Organizer: Phoebe Lakin

“The words of a dead man/ Are modified in the guts of the living.” In line with W.H. Auden’s visceral phrasing, our panel encourages participants to think about literary reception as a process of... more

Lyric Thinking

Organizer: Andrew Franta

This seminar is interested in how lyric poetry has been conceptualized and practiced as a distinctive form of thinking. The inquiry it proposes intersects with prior critical approaches to poetry’s... more

Structures of Change

Organizer: Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz

How is change structured? Or rather, under what terms can change be thought as structure at all? Does such a question require rethinking our conceptions of structure? Or of change? Catherine... more

The Limits of Property and The Potentiality of the Common(s), a Literary Exploration

Organizer: Federico Correa Pose

Although it can be affirmed that a notion of the common(s) was already present in Marx's later writings, the interest in it and its development as an autonomous concept is quite new in Marxist... more

Hospitality at the End of the World

Organizer: Penny Vlagopoulos

What can hospitality do in end times? The crises of the twenty-first century—climate change and ecological disaster, technological determinism, militarized conflicts and their devastating... more

Reading the Classroom

Organizer: Alexander Manshel

This seminar invites participants to consider the curricula, institutions, and pedagogies of literary studies as objects of literary analysis. As Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan have argued... more

STRENGTH, SPIRITUALISM AND ROMANCE IN ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART

Organizer: Nwankwo Nwaezeigwe

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a novel of a distinctive masculine character called Okonkwo. From the novel’s prologue depicting an epic wrestling contest to its epilogue depicting the suicidal... more

The Evolution of Interactivity in Storytelling: From Epistolary Novels to Digital Media

Organizer: Hudson Moura

Interactivity has long been a cornerstone in storytelling, engendering a dynamic relationship between creators, writers, readers, players, and interactors. This seminar aims to dissect the multi-... more

epistemologies of brown/ness(es): racialization, sexuality, and empires

Organizer: Neelofer Qadir

Feeling brown, being down. Feeling down, being brown. As we understand it, brown indexes operations of law, affect, sexuality, relation, empire(s), capital. Brown can function as an accusation or a... more

Iqra’*: The Qura’nic Intertext in Comparative Literature: Palimpsest and Affect

Organizer: M.A.R. Habib

Reading literature, we often come across references to sacred texts, either featured as epigraphs or meshed into texts in subtler ways. Palimpsestic intertextuality suggests that texts contain traces... more

Reading for and from the Hinterland

Organizer: Esther Peeren

This seminar proposes the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the present as inhabited by the legacies of colonialism, increasing labour precarity under late capitalist... more

Feminism and the Uses of Guilt

Organizer: Kimberly Anne Coles

Scholars working in identity-based fields have embraced a range of affective states—pride, shame, rage, irony, modesty, earnestness, and repair—as theoretically and politically productive affects.... more

Law and the Senses

Organizer: Yiorgos-Evgenios Douliakas

In the past years, scholars working in the field of Law and Literature have focused on the role of affect in shaping our sense of law and justice. Although law is supposedly the domain of Reason,... more

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