Seminars

Alternative cosmologies of Time

Organizer: Ben Van Overmeire

We are obsessed with time. In one sense, the question has become societal and existential, with the potential to deeply affect our and other species: how long before anthropogenic climate change... more

The Museum as Muse

Organizer: Michelle Clayton

In 1999, New York’s MoMA staged the exhibition “The Museum as Muse”, a collection of modern and contemporary works focused on exploring images and practices of the museum. Although it might seem... more

Men and Masculinities in American Television

Organizer: Cassandra Luca

Masculinity is in crisis. This comes as no surprise to anyone following current events, taking note that the perpetrators of violent crimes (most significantly mass shootings, terrorism, and domestic... more

The Shadow of Imagination in Flight: Sufi, Cognitive, and Philosophical Poetics in Conversation

Organizer: Arjun Nair

Can poetry express, cultivate, and help us discover and access forms of knowledge that other media (prose, music, painting, etc.) cannot? Is there a distinct advantage to doing theological,... more

Romanticism, World Literature, and the Question of a Global Archive

Organizer: Emily Sun

This seminar invites participants to approach Romanticism as a pivotal historical period in European and global modernity, as a literary and artistic movement that goes beyond the late 18th-early... more

A Dehistoricized Authority of Imperial Monopoly and Cultural Uprooting in Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land: A Study

Organizer: Jebun Geeti

In his critically acclaimed travelogue In An Antique Land, Amitav Ghosh journeyed to Egypt in1980 to trace the history of a medieval Indian slave “Boma” and his Tunisian master Abraham Ben Yiju. When... more

Embodied Reception

Organizer: Deniz Başar

What is the role of different art media in transmitting an experience that the reader, listener, or viewer has not had? And what is the political significance of this transmission? In this seminar we... more

Cultural responses to environmental displacements

Organizer: Sophia Brown

There are now widespread fears over climate change, which increasingly are yoked to existing anxieties and myths about migration, fuelling sensationalist and inaccurate portrayals of a world where... more

Queer and Trans Universities

Organizer: Jessy Nyiri

Colleges and universities may be the only institutional locations in which queer and trans people are not underrepresented relative to the general population. Possibly for that reason, figures of... more

Crisis of Failure/Failure of Crisis

Organizer: Anannya Mukherjee

This seminar interrogates and mobilizes failure as a point of departure from capitalist imperatives of progress, growth, optimism, productivity and production, discovery and acquisition,... more

Cultural Production and Curation

Organizer: Sean Macdonald

In a discussion of governance in the Analects, Confucius notes how the important anthology of poetry, ‘the Book of Odes,’ numbers three hundred and can be summarized in one phrase: “Thought without... more

Manifestations in the Mundane:Narrating Everyday Life in Diasporic Literature

Organizer: Yemi Ajisebutu

When we think of Literature of the Diaspora, we often do not think of the mundane. However, narratives of the lives of Diasporic subjects are rooted in their experiences of the mundane in everyday... more

Avatars, Heteronyms, Phantoms: Life Writing, Literary Masks, and the Dispersion of the Self

Organizer: Laura Cernat

As the age of online avatars as a source of anonymity is superseded by the obverse phenomenon (instead of real persons under fictitious names, algorithms using real names are increasingly part of our... more

It’s Just Words: Large Language Models & Language without Representation

Organizer: Cordelia Belton

We might be reasonably sure that language does things. Language also purports to tell us about the world. We don’t merely talk, we talk about things; this is what it is for language to represent. But... more

Encounters: Textual, Digital, and Otherwise Mediated

Organizer: Jason Beckman

In this seminar, we are interested in exploring various complexities of the encounters that occur through media. Textual and visual media offer the possibility of encounter in many regards, as... more

The Politics and Possibilities of Naming

Organizer: Edith Adams

In My Garden (Book), Jamaica Kincaid reflects upon her relationship to her garden and its inextricability from dynamics of control that have characterized colonial histories. At one moment in the... more

Transnational Literature and Transnational Aesthetics: Developments and Negotiations

Organizer: Tijana Przulj

In his 2021 book Transnational Literature: The Basics, Paul Jay describes transnational literature as “a particular type of literature, emergent at an identifiable historical moment and dealing,... more

Translation and Feeling

Organizer: Marie Ostby

How does it feel to translate a text from its native language into another that is foreign to it, or to translate words composed by someone else into one’s own idiom? Arthur Sze describes the... more

The Plasticity of Plasticity

Organizer: Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang

As the concept of plasticity has travelled across feminist science studies and new materialisms to Black, queer, and trans studies, its meaning has itself become unstable—or plastic. Jules Gill-... more

Affect in/and Literary Translation

Organizer: Sofia Monzon

The wealth of scholarship on the topic of affect and emotions within Cultural Studies is bound to impact the field of Translation Studies. Inspired by Kaisa Koskinen’s Deleuzian approach to... more

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