Seminars

Surface Effects: Visuality in Text, Textuality in Image

Organizer: Shannon Forest

Rachel Cusk’s recent Second Place (2022) is haunted by a series of paintings. At the beginning of the text, the narrator describes stumbling upon the work of a painter, L: “Each time I stepped up to... more

Archives of the Planetary

Organizer: Christine Xiong

Édouard Glissant, in Poetics of Relation (1990), famously emphasizes that “Cultures develop in a single planetary space but to different ‘times.’ It would be impossible to determine either a real... more

Bodies in Crises, Crises as Bodies in the Middle East and North Africa

Organizer: Merve Tabur

The twenty-first century has been described as the age of crisis marked by climate change, and financial, political, and humanitarian turmoil. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is often... more

Neo-Imperialist Warfare and Horror in Central and Eastern Europe Past and Present

Organizer: Eva Hudecova

In February of 2023, Russia invaded Ukraine. With this neo-imperialist act of aggression, Russia not only caused innumerable new traumas and horrors, but also reopened a panoply of old wounds, the... more

Nonfiction: A Global South Genre

Organizer: Haider Shahbaz

Literary studies in the fields of anticolonialism, postcolonialism, and the Global South often focus on fictional genres, especially novels. While it is important to pay attention to fiction, this... more

Whither "Relation"?

Organizer: Ren Ellis Neyra

In 1939, Aimé Césaire wrote in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: “And this land screamed for centuries that we are bestial brutes; that the human pulse [les pulsations de l’humanité] stops at the... more

The ‘Minor’ in World Literature: Reconfigurations, Recognitions, and Resonances

Organizer: Simla Dogangun

In the expansive landscape of world literature, the notion of “the minor” materializes as a nuanced and intricate realm, concurrently exposing and obscuring voices from the periphery. The term “... more

(Dis)embodied Forms

Organizer: Mehak Khan

By all accounts, we are living in a new age of form in literary criticism: the last decade has seen a slew of monographs, articles, and special issues devoted to what Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid... more

Violence and Literary Form

Organizer: Lily Gurton-Wachter

This seminar investigates how literary form engages with and responds to violence, and how violence shapes literary form. We conceive of violence broadly, and we encourage papers that examine its... more

Radical Medeas

Organizer: Zina Giannopoulou

Medea has captured the attention and imagination of artists and audiences in multiple media at least since the earliest extant literature of ancient Greece. She is at once a woman, a daughter, a wife... more

Beyond the Anthropocene: New Perspectives in Postcolonial EH

Organizer: Sarah Dimick

Now that the Anthropocene thesis has been thoroughly critiqued–by postcolonial, Indigenous, and Black studies–what becomes apparent in its wake? What issues, frameworks, or modes of reading did the... more

Temporalities of Memory

Organizer: Michael McGillen

A key challenge facing memory studies, despite its central role in interdisciplinary humanities work over the past 30 years, is how the field can survive in the face of a contemporary culture whose “... more

Remaking Folklore and Myth on Page, Screen and Stage since 1990

Organizer: Lily Li

This panel aims to explore aesthetic and thematic innovations in the remaking of national or transnational folklore and myths from various cultures in literature, film, TV, and theater performance,... more

Melancholia

Organizer: Divya Menon

What is melancholia? Is it an illness, a temperament, a mood, or something else altogether? The word derives from the classical Greek for black bile, the bodily humor ancients considered the cause of... more

Feminist and Gender Literature

Organizer: Ahmed Hussein Joudah Alboabdullah

يعتبر الأدب النسوي إحدى الظواهر الأدبية الحديثة في الساحة الأدبية والنقدية، إذ أنه يركز على المسائل النسوية وقضايا المرأة التحررية، وقد شغلت مسألة الكتابة النسوية حيزا هاما في الدراسات النقدية، ومن... more

Narrating the Biosphere: Of Plants and Animals

Organizer: Keijiro Suga

The earth is commonly said to be shaped by the four elements. But it also depends on the biosphere: the region on, above, and below the Earth's surface where life exists, a narrow zone in which soil... more

Pushing Our Limits? Implicating Queer Spectacle in East Asian Literature and Media

Organizer: Rebecca Ehrenwirth

This seminar invites papers on queer spectacle from across East Asian literature and media which forces their consumers to confront their own allegiance with insidiously damaging norms. We are... more

Is Gender Feminism a Conscientious Precaity or Immutable Contingency?

Organizer: Jayshree Singh

The book named 'Undressing Feminism: A Philosophical Expose' (2002) written by Ellen R. Klein has questioned women's vindication of rights in context of understanding the world of men and... more

A Polycritical Theory: Escaping categories of injustice (there is no escape)

Organizer: Ted Geier

Academia microsilages identitarian dominations. Economic or cultural, environmental or socioeconomic critique. But the field refuses such divisive abbreviations, articulating racial capitalist... more

The Rhetoric of Value

Organizer: Sam Samore

Value-theoretical readings of Marx have become increasingly popular in the humanities. For some literary critics, value criticism has brought about a new approach to social objectivity via “real... more

ACLA