Seminars

Nonhuman Aesthetics: Contemporary Art Photography

Organizer: renée c. hoogland

This seminar seeks to intervene in critical-theoretical debates on photography in a digital age. Rather than starting from the assumption that the digital follows the analog in photography, one of... more

Queer Contemporaneities: Anachronism and Gender (ICLA Gender Studies Research Committee Seminar)

Organizer: Jordana Greenblatt

We seek to explore anachronism broadly as non-coincidence between an object and interpretive categories/narratives used to study it, specifically concerning gender and sexuality. Sexuality as a... more

Aesthetic/Anti-Aesthetic

Organizer: John Brenkman

We seek papers that address literary and artistic works that interrogate or contest the aesthetic even as they seek to create new artistic forms and new modes of aesthetic responsiveness. The... more

Ways of Reading Racialized Ecologies

Organizer: Cheryl Lousley

Tania Aguila-Way and Zishad Lak, co-organizers This seminar is on methods of reading literary texts that illuminate the racialized dimensions of the environment and climate change. Ian Baucom... more

Launching from Poe

Organizer: Dominique Jullien

Launching from Poe This seminar explores Edgar A. Poe's legacy as a global icon of modernity. As Karen Grumberg states in a recent issue of Poe Studies (2020), “The scholarly interest in Poe as a... more

The Will before Psychoanalysis

Organizer: Andrea Gadberry

Long before the emergence of a conceptual vocabulary that named the unconscious and its wishes—that adumbrated a modern subject’s desires, repetitions, and obsessions—there was a robust conversation... more

Relatability in the Novel

Organizer: Thom Dancer

This seminar explores the value of relatability in the novel. For many years, claims about the relatability or, more often, the unrelatability of characters, plots, and stories were understood to be... more

Glocal Cosmopolitanisms

Organizer: Nicoletta Pireddu

The term “glocalization” seems to come from a Japanese compound word that first designated the adaptation of agricultural techniques to local conditions before it entered the business and marketing... more

Narrative Prosthesis Today: A Critical Reassessment

Organizer: Christina Fogarasi

It has been nearly twenty five years since the publication of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis. This seminar considers the status of its eponymous central concept. ... more

Activist Writing / Activist Reading

Organizer: Leila Essa

In popular reception and particularly in the age of social media, the attribute “activist” is frequently attached to writers without too much further explanation. The act of reading, on the other... more

A Relational Turn

Organizer: Alex Brostoff

A Relational Turn In a recent interview, Judith Butler suggested that over the past two decades, intellectual thought has witnessed a relational turn, a shift towards frameworks that understand... more

Certainty and Uncertainty, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory

Organizer: Gabriel Horowitz

In recent decades questions of certainty and uncertainty have taken on the epochal character of potentially defining an era. The postmodern turn of the 1980s was defined in part by the growing... more

How to See What Has Been Done with Words

Organizer: Nan Da

"How to See What Has Been Done with Words" tackles anew the empiricism of speech acts—not how they’re represented, with Ann Banfield’s unspeakable sentences as a limit case, but how the effects and... more

Uprootings: Autochthony, Race, and the Literature of Place

Organizer: Cynthia Quarrie

Metaphors of roots and rootedness, and their obverse — rootlessness, deracination, even “eradication”— are, as Christy Wampole puts it, “site[s] of extreme figuration," which suggests the extent to... more

(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm

Organizer: Erin Graff Zivin

How does rhythm (and its attendant art forms) allow us to produce philosophical or conceptual thought? What concepts (ethical, political, aesthetic, or otherwise) emerge from music, dance, sound,... more

Forms and Theories of Care: Approaches for the Future

Organizer: Sharon Marquart

A concept with its roots in feminist ethics, care is a category invoked across an array of fields to confront the challenges we face today both in scholarship and in the contemporary global order.... more

Asian American Relationality

Organizer: Seulghee Lee

This seminar aims to assess and augment contemporary frameworks of Asian American racial formation through prisms of in-group relationality. Inspired by recent attention to questions regarding Asian... more

Poetic Language Now

Organizer: Rebecca Kosick

Poetry has exploded off the page in recent decades, making a prominent home for itself in new semiotic and material environments. Poems circulate on subway systems, through platforms and apps, on... more

Translating Literature into Moving Pictures: Literary Adaptation & Animation

Organizer: Audrey Louckx

From its very beginning, animation, like cinema its sibling medium, drew inspiration from literature in the hope of bringing to life timeless tales and beloved stories. Across the world, animation... more

Mediterranean Comparisons: Literature Beyond Borders

Organizer: C. Ceyhun Arslan

The Mediterranean has often been considered a transitional space—a rite of passage, an interval between borders, a route to conquest. But what of the Mediterranean as a context and a framework... more

ACLA