Seminars

Comparative Literature and Human Rights Advocacy: Georg Brandes and Beyond

Organizer: William Banks

The name of the great Danish literary historian and critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927) continues to evoke numerous associations; among them his foundational role in the launching of the Nordic Modern... more

Pastoralism, Physics and Historicism: Three-Tiered Temporality Construction in Nabokov’s Ada

Organizer: Juan Wu

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is probably the most important ignored novel written after Nabokov moved from America to Swiss. Ada is seen as an aesthetic withdrawal from the social and political... more

Disentangling Race, Gender and Sexuality Through Literature in Central America

Organizer: Cesar Salgado Portillo

This seminar aims to explore the themes of identity in literature produced in the last by Central Americans through the lens of common fixation on race, gender and... more

The Multispecies Turn: Human and Nonhuman Entanglements

Organizer: Nathaniel Otjen

The term “multispecies,” along with kindred concepts such as “transspecies” and “interspecies,” have proliferated throughout the environmental humanities over the past decade. Although they were once... more

Inheritance Between Destruction and Overcoming: Heidegger and Black Thought

Organizer: Calvin Warren

In recent years, the ontological turn in Black Studies has come to occupy a central place in debates about Blackness and anti-Blackness. At the center of these debates is the problem that Fanon... more

The Gift, Sacrifice, and Forgiveness: Blackness Deconstructed

Organizer: Taija Mars McDougall

Originally published in 1925 and republished in 1950, Marcel Mauss’ The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies offers various reflections on giving and the force of... more

Return Literature

Organizer: Laila Amine

From diasporic returns to an ancestral home, reverse migrations, and the return visit of exiles to their country of origin, the protean genre of return literature often foregrounds an engagement with... more

Multispecies Entanglements in Literatures of the Global South

Organizer: Thakshala Tissera

This panel aims to bring together the theoretical, methodological and political concerns of literary animal studies and postcolonial studies. As theoretical frameworks, the intersection of the two is... more

Meme Aesthetics

Organizer: Mia You

Additional co-organizer: Stephen Best, UC Berkeley Dank memes, viral queens, magic dreams. In this seminar, we invite scholars from a range of disciplines to broach the topic memes in any way... more

Posthumous Publication

Organizer: Richard Thomson

Though “posthumousness” takes a variety of forms, the texts within its ambit share a quality that Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in Shadow Archives, calls “a belated form of timeliness.” The editorial... more

Periodizing the '90s

Organizer: Madeline Lane-McKinley

By any measure, the ‘90s appear now as a cultural watershed. Musically, grunge and rap exploded onto the world stage, as did new pop sounds from boy bands and girl groups to singer songwriters,... more

Literary Culture Across the Early Modern Orthodox World

Organizer: Ashley Morse

Orthodox literature and rhetoric underwent profound changes in the early modern period, shaped in the crucible of a rapidly changing political and technological landscape. This expansive confessional... more

Ontological Anarchy and Infrapolitics

Organizer: Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott

Ontological Anarchy and Infrapolitics In contemporary debates, after the impact of neoliberal globalization and the eruption of theories such as post-Marxism, post-colonialism, and post-modernism... more

Rhythm and Poetry

Organizer: Susan Bernstein

Rhythm and Poetry This seminar invites papers that explore the concept and operations of rhythm in poetry and beyond, especially in light of philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to rhythm.... more

Civilizing Animals

Organizer: Keridiana Chez

In H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), the botanist declares to the utopia-planning narrator: “I do not like your utopia, if there are to be no dogs.” Yet humanity’s... more

Moving Stories: Teaching Migration Literature

Organizer: Tasnim Qutait

In her Orwell prize-winning memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (2019), Kate Clanchy details her experience as a teacher in the British public school system. Clanchy came to fame in... more

Reading Literary Institutions around 1900

Organizer: Alexander Starre

To confront literary institutions means to confront paradoxes at every level. Institutionalization is the enemy of “real” literature and art, avant-gardists and critical theorists will tell you.... more

Race, Caste, and Colorism

Organizer: Laura Brueck

In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), Isabel Wilkerson argues that the United States operates under a caste system, one in which race is merely “the primary tool, and... more

Resituating Structure and Worldhood: Ecocriticism and Literary Theory

Organizer: Ian Tan

As a contemporary theoretical movement that imbricates scientific inquiry, literary representation, and cultural awareness about the “shifting” of paradigmatic frames which allow alternative modes of... more

The Politics of Reading and Writing in Chinese and Sinophone Literature

Organizer: Cara Healey

This seminar explores depictions of reading and writing in Chinese and Sinophone literature across time and space. Chinese literary traditions – from Confucian and Daoist canons to Lu Xun’s “madman”... more

ACLA