Seminars

Anyone who would like to organize a seminar for our 2023 Annual Meeting (Sheraton Grand in Chicago, Illinois, March 16-19, 2023) must first post a call for papers here. Calls for papers will be accepted through September 30, 2022.

The Literature of Plasticity

Organizer: Tyler Williams

Catherine Malabou places her signature concept of “plasticity” within the material encounters between the Kantian, Hegelian, and Derridean threads of the continental philosophical tradition and... more

Southern Concepts

Organizer: Julia Ng

Too often, the history of critical theory has been written as one of the afterlife of the European Enlightenment, the reach of its ideas measured by their applicability to local contexts or to area... more

The South Asian Diaspora: Dynamics of Change

Organizer: Medha Bhattacharyya

“Diaspora” has broadly come to mean all people who have a particular country of origin but live outside it either due to 'pull' or 'push' factor. According to James Clifford the diaspora is a “... more

Global Literary History and Peter J. Kalliney’s The Aesthetic Cold War (2022)

Organizer: Jap-Nanak Makkar

It is a commonly adopted procedure within postcolonial studies to situate literary objects of the colony in relation to the cultural heritage of the colonizer. Whether read under the “writing back”... more

Girlboss Aesthetics: Pop Feminism, Neoliberalism, and Capitalist Forms

Organizer: Deborah Thurman

The 2020s have rung the death knell of the girlboss. She expired, either from allegations of racism and abuse leveled at women CEOs and entrepreneurs (including Steph Korey, Christene Barberich,... more

The Ends of Art

Organizer: Robert Lehman

This seminar seeks philosophically and historically informed reflections on the end of art—not only in the sense of art’s terminus but also in the sense of art’s aim or ... more

Performing Protest – Contesting Russia’s Nationalism

Organizer: Yana Meerzon

In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Women in Black, a transnational feminist anti-war resistance movement, staged a powerful anti-war... more

Modernism Beyond Borders

Organizer: Thais Rutledge

In All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman says, “[t]o be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth transformation of ourselves and the... more

Shakespeare and Mediterranean Geographies

Organizer: Tulin Ece Tosun

With the advent of the age of exploration, trade, commerce, and travel became increasingly important in the Mediterranean world during the early modern era. Exploring new avenues for trade was the... more

The Eclipse of the Subcontinental Imagination

Organizer: Anustup Basu

The current age is witnessing the passing of generations with palpable or immediately inherited memories of a wider cultural cosmology of pre-Partition South Asia. That is, not just in terms of... more

Cybernetic Poetics and New Approaches to Understanding Literature

Organizer: Yiren Zheng

This panel proposes to use cybernetics as an analytical approach to understanding how literary activities and aesthetics work in and as complex systems. We gather scholars working on various types of... more

Iberian and Latin American TV shows as masquerades: blurring the lines between reality and fiction

Organizer: Monserrat Garcia Rodenas

The goal of this seminar is to provide a forum in which to discuss how TV shows (reality shows, true crime shows, documentary broadcasts, docufictions, and webseries) bridge the gap between factual... more

Arab Passages: Literary Interventions and Worldly Transits

Organizer: Eman Ghanayem

What is Arab literature in the context of continuous Arab displacement? What are the shared aesthetics and themes of Arab writings in our contemporary times? How do they differ or relate to Arab... more

Dignified Bodies: State Violence, Restitution, and Memory in Latinx and Latin American Literature

Organizer: Irina Popescu

This seminar explores the ways in which Latinx and Latin American literature from the colonial period to the present day has used representations of the body to engage with the discourses of... more

A Cinematic Internationalism? Reframing World Cinema

Organizer: Michael Allan

A remarkable passage of Vachel Lindsay’s 1915 The Art of the Moving Picture describes cinema as “a delineation of the world” in which “Pekin and China, Harvard and Massachusetts, Portland and... more

Conspiratorial Pedagogy: How to Teach about Conspiracy Theories

Organizer: Owen Cantrell

We live in a golden age of conspiracies. From relatively innocuous conspiracies such as Area 51 or the Denver International Airport to more dangerous conspiracies such as QAnon or vaccines with... more

The Politics of Political Criticism

Organizer: Rachel Ablow

It seems to be a mandate of our times that literary criticism be “political,” yet what that means is sometimes murky. This is particularly true of criticism of nineteenth-century literature, at least... more

The Circulation of Portuguese Language and Portuguese Speaking Cultures and Literatures

Organizer: José Luís Jobim

Much of the emerging nationalism in Europe – both past and present – was focused on language and culture, often to promote the association between language/... more

“Heretical Kabbalahs,” Secular Sublimations, and "Modernist Mysticisms," a seminar sponsored by the ICLA Research Committee, Religion, Ethics, and Literature

Organizer: Kitty Millet

This seminar explores literature through the lens of “heretical kabbalah,” secular sublimation, and “modernist mysticism” projects during the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-... more

Revolutionary Ecologies: Literature, Theory, Praxis

Organizer: Alexander Sorenson

In recent decades, figures from the scholarly domains of literary, cultural, and eco-criticism, as well as from the public sphere, have advanced a number of approaches to environmental subjects that... more

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