Seminars

Indigenous Memory: Philosophies for the End of the World

Organizer: Ethan Madarieta

“For indigenous peoples, place, land, sovereignty, and memory matter.” Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma) This panel explores Indigenous philosophies of memory and their ontological,... more

Theorizing (with) the legacy of Cold War internationalism

Organizer: James Robertson

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of scholarship on the politics and aesthetics of socialist and anti-colonial internationalisms during the Cold War. In conferences, research clusters,... more

Poetics of Dust

Organizer: Jocelyn Holland

The pervasiveness of dust in the key areas of modern thought -- and in particular: religion, literature, and science -- can scarcely be overstated. The Christian idea of a cyclical departure from and... more

Rethinking Advertisements in Cross-Genre Media

Organizer: Ikuho Amano

This seminar explores socio-cultural effects, semantics, and aesthetic components of advertisements in print media, TV or radio commercials, internet affiliate ads, and those in other platforms. In... more

Postcolonial Formalism

Organizer: Dominic O'Key

This seminar interrogates the relationship between postcolonial studies and “new formalism”. We invite submissions that explore how postcolonial literary criticism and new formalism might mutually... more

African Literatures: Politics and Poetics

Organizer: Alexander Fyfe

Many of the critical flashpoints in the history of modern African writing have been underwritten by questions about the relations between politics and aesthetics. From the language debates ensuing... more

Dewdrops on Embers:Deconstructing the Chequered Tropes of Existential Agonies in Contemporary Arab American Poetry

Organizer: Rakhi Vyas

Dewdrops on Embers : Deconstructing the Chequered Tropes of Existential Agonies in Contemporary Arab American Poetry ... more

Literary Representations of Migration and Displacement Across Nations and States

Organizer: Samuel Jaffee

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently claimed that migration across the Mediterranean to southern Europe intends to “destroy our identity and our civilization to turn us into undefined... more

Visualizations of Revolution: Historical Memory in the Filmic Form

Organizer: Rosa Martinez

In January 1896, the Lumière Brothers screened Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat to an eager Parisian audience. It’s been rumored for decades that those in attendance ran in fear of a life-sized train... more

Shifting Paradigms: Cultural Responses to Changing Migration Patterns in Latin America

Organizer: Cecily Raynor

The nature of migration to, from, and within Latin America has undergone significant changes since the onset of the new millennium. As economic challenges persist, migrants from the region are still... more

Cuba’s Archive of Cultural Imagination: Filling the Voids

Organizer: María Isabel Alfonso

A significant part of Cuba’s literary and cultural productions from the first decades of the Revolution challenged the aesthetics favored by the establishment in many different ways, and the... more

Thinking the “Unthinkable World”: Theories of Horror, Horrors of Theory

Organizer: Saul Anton

In the fun-house of contemporary horror films and literature, our world manifests as an exhibition of atrocities—ecological catastrophe, capitalist exploitation, unbridled violence, thinking machines... more

Comparative Energetics: Energy Encounters and Beyond

Organizer: Jordan Kinder

Energy humanities takes energy sources and their infrastructures as primary objects and subjects of study. Emerging under urgent material and intellectual conditions overdetermined by planetary... more

Tourism, Coloniality, and the Environment

Organizer: Hannah Cole

“For tourists, the sunshine cannot be serious,” claimed Derek Walcott in his 1992 Nobel Prize speech. In contrasting tourists’ reductive expectations of the sites they visit with locals’ awareness of... more

The Old Ones: Modernities and Antiquities of Global Weird Fictions

Organizer: Sam Lasman

China Miéville describes how the iconic beings of Weird fiction, epitomized by Cthulhu, possess “radical unremembered alterity” even as they are “always described as ancient.” They are at once both... more

Autistic Shit

Organizer: Sean Yeager

This seminar responds to Remi Yergeau’s question: “What might autistic shit signify? (16). We use capacious definitions for both “autism” and “shit.” The latter of these two terms is notoriously... more

Intergenerational Jewish Dialogues in Literature

Organizer: Sharon Zelnick

It is a commonplace that modernist and contemporary Jewish authors, poets, and philosophers engage with their Jewish predecessors. This seminar approaches this broad topic, and attempts to sharpen it... more

Mixed Messages from Projects of (Personal) Discovery

Organizer: Travis Landry

This seminar examines the place of personal discovery in today's scholarship. Shadowed by the pandemic and concerned about an assault on the humanities, the field of literary studies nevertheless... more

Approaching the Arboreal Humanities

Organizer: Richard Grusin

Trees are in the air these days. Forest ecologists describe how trees communicate with one another, as well as laying out the complex interdependency of trees, plants, and fungi. Contemporary writers... more

Reparations and Forgiveness After COVID-19?

Organizer: Darwin Tsen

Following the U.S. government’s termination of the COVID national emergency on April 11th, 2023, the World Health Organization declared on May 5th that the virus no longer constituted a “public... more

ACLA