Seminars

Ethnography and/as Literature: Content, Context, and Comparisons

Organizer: Moira Weigel

This seminar will explore ethnography as a method of studying literature—as well as a literary genre. How do literary scholars constitute our objects? As a field, we do not tend to talk... more

Book Censorship and the Politics of Literature

Organizer: Johs Rasmussen

During the last obscenity trial involving a text-only medium in the United States, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that William Burrough’s novel Naked Lunch (1959) was “not... more

Realism, Globalization, and Cosmopolis

Organizer: Didier Coste

This seminar addresses questions about realism’s aesthetic and political implications from a global perspective. The genre of the novel is said to have spread all over the world at the time of the... more

Girlhood Aesthetics: Coming of Age in the Cultural Imaginary

Organizer: Amanda Greer

Girlhood art, literature, and media have often been discussed via representational analysis, staking moralizing claims by labelling some representations “good” and others as “bad” for an imagined... more

Embracing Glocality: New Perspectives on Arab and Anglophone Arab Literature and Film

Organizer: Ileana Baird

Defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as “the simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems,” glocalization is... more

Comparing Hindi Literature: Then and Now in the World

Organizer: Bhavya Tiwari

Bhavya Tiwari & Sucheta Kanjilal ACLA 2025 Comparing Hindi Literature: Then and Now in the World Hindi literary texts, authors, and movements are often pitted against other South Asian... more

The “Critical” in Critical Caste Studies: Possibilities and Challenges

Organizer: Shruti Jain

The relatively recent rise of Critical Caste Studies has taken academia by storm. In 2021, Gajendra Ayyathurai wrote “the global academy needs a new interdisciplinary field, Critical Caste... more

Sensation and/as Method

Organizer: Yanbing Er

This seminar seeks to explore the ways in which sensation works as a critical method in relation to modes of reading and writing. Our goal is to uncover new practices of knowing and knowledge-making... more

We Meet Again: The Psychoanalytic (Re) Turn in Literary Studies

Organizer: Yael Segalovitz

By the end of the 20th century, psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic and clinical practice seemed to be on its deathbed in US culture. It was battered by criticism from feminist and queer perspectives,... more

Translating the Caribbean

Organizer: Simona Bertacco

Heterolingualism is one of the defining characteristics of literature in the Caribbean, as authors switch between languages and language varieties in unique and organic ways. The Caribbean region in... more

Archipelagic Buddha and Christ: Towards Multilingualism as Method

Organizer: Wen-chin Ouyang

Literary multilingualism has precipitated an energetic reflection on the theory and praxis of Comparative Literature, Translations Studies, and World Literature in the 21st century. However, the... more

Between Worlds and Worldlessness

Organizer: Roland Vegso

Over the last few decades, the concept of the “world” has reemerged as one of the most unsettling theoretical problems for contemporary thought. Our historical moment appears to be defined by a... more

Global Legal Imagination

Organizer: Adam Schoene

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination, in which he interrogates the possibilities and limitations of law and its relationship with language and... more

Strict Scrutiny: Interpretation, Norms, (In)Justice

Organizer: Rebecca Saunders

Prompted by the spate of alarming decisions recently handed down by SCOTUS (Trump v. U.S., Fischer, Garland, cases overturning Chevron) and the motley combination of interpretative methods (... more

Ecology, Ecstasy, Mysticism

Organizer: Alexander Sorenson

How should Spring bring forth a garden on hard stone? Become earth, that you may grow flowers of many colors. —Rumi The soul is all things. She has being with the stones and growing with the trees... more

The Sentient Animal and the Author in Renaissance Humanism

Organizer: Hervé Goerger

The Renaissance marked a pivotal moment in the history of human-animal relations: as humanism emphasized the dignity, potential, and centrality of the human being, it also prompted a re-evaluation of... more

Decolonization and Unevenness in Material Contexts

Organizer: Auritro Majumder

Though a buzzword, “decolonization” is far from a settled matter. From a by-now-distant sequence of political independence to contemporaneous efforts to decolonize institutions, decolonization has... more

The End of the Beginning: Post-Soul Humor

Organizer: Alex Valin

This panel invites researchers to consider how African American writers deploy humor within what critics have termed the “post-soul,” “post-Black,” “Black post-Blackness,” and “New Black Aesthetic”... more

Large Language Models and Literature

Organizer: Nina Begus

Writers, scholars, artists, and students are now using or negotiating novel AI writing tools, aiding in their development by their very use. What can be gained in this deluge of machine words?... more

World Literature and the Ottoman Institution of Slavery

Organizer: Arif Camoglu

This seminar aims to bring together critical reflections on literary representations, from across continents and centuries, of enslavement in the Ottoman Empire. It will spotlight the place of the... more

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