Seminars

Khôra: Surfaces, Topographies, and Topologies in 20th and 21st Centuries Thought

Organizer: James Martell

Among philosophy and theory’s most enigmatic concepts appears the notion of “khôra”, an “area,” “field,” or genetic “surface,” but also a “mother” or “wet nurse,” appearing in Plato’s Timaeus as a... more

Renewable Societies: The World after Petrocultures

Organizer: Casey Williams

2025 is the year when global fossil fuel use will finally begin to decrease, ending a period of energy history initiated in the eighteenth century which has traumatized the earth and its inhabitants... more

The Periodical and Method, the Periodical as Method

Organizer: Anthony Stott

In the nearly two decades since Scholes and Latham (2006) proclaimed its arrival, periodical studies has blossomed into a vibrant area of study that has fruitfully defied coherence and orthodoxy by... more

Narratives of Immunity, Writings of Resistance

Organizer: Maebh Long

From the late nineteenth century, as the public adjusted to a world of germs and microbes, a discourse of immunity gave the reassurance of bodily defences. Outside of medical journals,... more

Poetic Grammars

Organizer: Julia Bloch

In “A Grammar of Waking,” the poet Tonya Foster writes, “Hungry / and articulate / syllables // graze the / field of this page.” Metapoetically invoking units of punctuation not as sound but on a... more

The Virtual Essence of Magical Realism in Global Literary and Cinematic Narratives

Organizer: Eugene Arva

Along its century-old history as a subject of literary theory and film criticism, magical realism has proved to be a particularly versatile, global mode of representation and one of the most... more

Human Rights Literary Adjacencies, Contiguities, Disjunctures

Organizer: Brenda Vellino

In the decade or so since human rights literary studies emerged as a subfield, important new areas responsive to the changing times have called for attention in scholarly and community organizing... more

The Caribbean and The American South: Interrogating Contemporary Literary, Artistic, and Cultural Relations

Organizer: Emily O'Dell

Connected by the shared experience of the “plantation system” (in the words of Martinican author Édouard Glissant), the relationship between the Caribbean and the American South has been studied from... more

Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa

Organizer: Hoda El Shakry

In a 2015 multimedia manifesto titled “Towards Arabfuturism/s” the Jordanian artist Sulaïman Majali writes that “Arabfuturism/s, like most creative provocations, is born of counter-culture” in which... more

Plant and Animal Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Organizer: Patricia Vieira

Until recently, plants and animals alike were studiously avoided as serious subjects for academic humanists. Worse, efforts to overcome this neglect sometimes contributed to misperceptions of these... more

Writing Literary Character(s)

Organizer: Daniel Aureliano Newman

Character is one of the trickiest of literary concepts. Most theorists agree that narrative, by definition, requires human or human-like characters, but of course characters are not really humans:... more

Figuring the Lyric Across Media

Organizer: Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth

Poetry’s complex relationship to film and television is “news that stays news:” from Chaplin discussing his desire to read Keats by an Italian lake in 1920 to T.S. Eliot references appearing in... more

The World and Latin American Literature: Cosmopolitanisms, Planetarity, and Global Networks

Organizer: Jose Carlos Diaz Zanelli

Latin American global narratives and cosmopolitan networks have a long and complex history. This issue has been at the heart of literary exchanges, political ventures, sociological and philosophical... more

Global Asias as Method

Organizer: Alya Ansari

Historically materialist procedures of reading have seemed remarkably preoccupied with the political, cultural, and economic rhythms of the Global North, and with the subjectivities produced by... more

Types and Typicality

Organizer: Dora Zhang

The great synthesis achieved by realism lies, according to Georg Lukács, in the depiction of “typical individuals in typical circumstances.” Typicality is, for him, the dialectical hinge between the... more

Glamour in Theory and Performance

Organizer: Julia Jarcho

For this year’s conference, we propose a seminar focused on the thing that drew many of us to the study of expressive forms to begin with: GLAMOUR. As total crisis accelerates, many of our... more

Solidarity Aesthetics

Organizer: Anthony Alessandrini

Does solidarity have an aesthetics? How would we recognize or define such a thing, and how might it challenge our assumptions about what art is and does? Building on Hannah Feldman and Rebecca... more

The Forgotten Forms of Contemporary Fiction

Organizer: Mitch Murray

Are there ghosts haunting the study of the contemporary? What undead forms and themes continue to shape the arts of the present, even as critics ignore or decontextualize them? This seminar invites... more

Sharing the World: Poetries Written by Women in the 21st Century

Organizer: Esther Sánchez-Pardo

Women’s poetries in the 21st century experiment, innovate, and engage fully with discourses around the accelerated pace of the present. Locally and contextually specific, they understand “sharing the... more

Caste-ing Academia: The Global Rise of (Critical) Caste Studies

Organizer: Shruti Jain

North American academia in the last few decades has been forced to confront Caste as a crucial analytic in the study of the local and the global through various disciplinary perspectives. With... more

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