Seminars

TV-Philosophy

Organizer: Jeroen Gerrits

This seminar aims to explore TV-series at their intersection with philosophy. As a newer sibling to the sub-discipline of film-philosophy, TV-philosophy neither reduces television series to... more

Aesthetics and Politics of Necrofiction

Organizer: Ioana Pribiag

Aesthetics and Politics of Necrofiction Death is universal; its conditions are not. Nor are its connections to memory. As Judith Butler explains, for death to count, for it to register as a... more

Marginalized Voices: The Representation of Peripheral Life in Literature

Organizer: Carlo Stranges

The representation of lives on the outskirts of society has been a staple of twentieth and twenty-first century media. From the romantic antiheroes to oppressed communities, the representations of... more

The Poetics of Collecting

Organizer: Guangchen Chen

To collect and to narrate are two common human instincts. But they are often at odds with each other. On the one hand, we desire to tell a story out of a collection of things; or rather, a collection... more

Illegibility and Aesthetic Form in the African Diasporas of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans

Organizer: Semilore Sobande

This seminar invites submissions that explore intentional illegibilites deployed in literary and visual forms in the African diasporas of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Despite their... more

Whiteness: Imploding the Impermeable and Invisible Monolith

Organizer: Niia Bishop

This seminar invites papers critically exploring whiteness as an invented political and social identity category. We seek to investigate its emergence from the transatlantic slave trade, its... more

Magical Realism as World Literature: Travelling Concept, Travelling Theory, Untranslatable

Organizer: Cesar Dominguez

In their 2020 The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century, Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier argue that the globalization of magical realism marks a new stage in the... more

Critical Whiteness and the Middle Ages: Past and Present

Organizer: Nahir I. Otaño Gracia

In the essay ‘Solidarity and the medieval invention of race’ Seeta Chaganti reminds us that Medievalists have access to archival and historical records, and we can examine these archives carefully in... more

Decolonisation and the Literary Field

Organizer: Michelle Kelly

From the current moment in which calls to decolonize literary studies prevail, we look back to the eras of political decolonization, and the changes they catalysed in literary cultures and... more

Time, Memory, and the Western

Organizer: Jordan Savage

Time and Memory in the Western "Wade: Mind telling me where we're going? Evans: No, I don't mind telling you. We're going to Contention City. We're going wait in a... more

Inventions of the Baroque

Organizer: Alex Verdolini

“The Baroque was seen as being restricted to one genre (architecture), or to an increasingly restrictive determination of periods and places, or yet again to a radical disavowal: the Baroque never... more

Comparative Caribbean Modernisms

Organizer: J. Dillon Brown

Scholars have frequently named the Caribbean as the crucible of what we now understand as the modern, such that if one understands modernism, in broad terms, as an aesthetic response to modernity,... more

Postcolonial Literature and Ecotheology

Organizer: George Handley

Secular criticism, as Edward Said defined it, has been central to the study of postcolonial literature. It is also clear, however, that traditionally secularist readings of postcolonial literature... more

Moving Past Lovecraft: New Visions of the Weird

Organizer: Alexander Sell

Academic discussions of weird fiction today are dominated by HP Lovecraft. This makes some sense, considering he promoted the term and is perhaps the name most associated with it. Yet, the weird... more

Rethinking the Comparative Studies on Asia-Latin America through Korea-Latin America

Organizer: JinAeng Choi

In recent years, there has been increased publications exploring transcultural movements and relations between Asia and Latin America. At the same time, the study of Korean popular culture,... more

The Relativity of Relativism and Objectivization on Normative Ground - Referring to Fundamental Rights, Private Law and Manifestations

Organizer: Jayshree Singh

The normative structures are subjective to external ways of manifesting the commensurable approach to moral relativistic psyche projecting that moral progress is the objective reality prevailing due... more

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