Seminars

Please select a seminar for which you would like to propose a paper. Current ACLA guidelines specify that each ACLA member may submit only ONE PAPER for consideration. Abstracts must be received by Sunday, October 31, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

Technology & Poiesis, East and West

Organizer: Timothy Murray

The conjunction of “Technology & Poiesis” stems from Western philosophies of technology, from Heidegger to Stiegler, Lyotard Nancy to Conley and Hansen, where techné contrasts the poiesis of... more

Crossovers: Imaginaries of Movement in Culture and Literary Aesthetics

Organizer: Anuparna Mukherjee

The recent pandemic that forced several “lockdowns” across the world, not only arrested the various orders of mobility but also generated new debates on movement and stasis under contingent and... more

Trauma, Censorship, and Narratives of Discomfort

Organizer: Nidhi Shrivastava

The recent scrapping of Mahashewta Devi’s short story “Draupadi” and the works of Dalit writers Bama and Sukhartharini from Delhi University Syllabus draws attention to the politics of erasure and... more

Memories of War in Other Worlds: Approaches to War Literature and Memories from the Global South

Organizer: Amitrajeet Mukherjee

Memories of military conflicts from both combatants and non-combatants alike have been a key tool in analyzing the unique traumas and socio-cultural affects of modern warfare. Scholars such as Samuel... more

Feasting and Fasting: Building Communities Cross-Culturally through Food?

Organizer: Elizabeth Liendo

In the literary tradition, food serves a communal purpose. It establishes connections, demonstrates kinship, and holds families together. Food also signals difference, heritage, and contributes to... more

Constructing the Other: Empathy and the Ethics of Imagining Difference in Literature, Sec. 1

Organizer: Arnab Roy

A central question engaging literary scholars today is, can the practice of reading literature make humans more empathetic, particularly towards those who do not share similar socio-cultural or... more

Embodying the Future: (Meta)Physical and Metaphoric Bodies in Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism

Organizer: Ruth S. Wenske

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in African speculative fiction (Eatough, 2017), as well as intellectual movements like Black Lives Matter and call to decolonize curricula. Consequently... more

"Comparatively Weird" – Dark Gnosis and the Weird in East/West Popular Culture(s)

Organizer: Ron S. Judy

Weird fiction has quietly undergone a global mini-renaissance in the past few decades, both due to an upswell of international interest in H.P. Lovecraft (whose followers include Michel Houellebecq,... more

Medical Humanities: Social Construction of Illness, Disability, and Ageing, Section 1

Organizer: Dr Pravin K Patel

Medical/Health Humanities is an interdisciplinary approach to understand and explore not only the profound effects of illness and disease on people but also the social and cultural sphere of such... more

(Re)Mapping Gender

Organizer: Tegan Zimmerman

Climate change, the pandemic, forced migration, military incursions, hardened human rights policies, lack of access to self-determination, and other retrenchments remind us of the interconnectedness... more

Reading African Literature and Popular Culture in the 21st Century: Insights on Emerging Trends and Concepts

Organizer: Augusta Atinuke Irele

African cultural production –literature, film, music, visual art, and sartorial aesthetics –has experienced a tremendous shift in visibility, significance, and resonance in the global economy of... more

Soma Studies

Organizer: Norma Cantu

Organizers propose Soma Studies, a mode of analysis that centers the intelligent body a primary social actor as recently argued in Stephanie Fetta’s Shaming Into Brown: Transactions of Race in Latina... more

Political Botany

Organizer: Jan Mieszkowski

“To what end do the trees of the primeval forest struggle with each other? For ‘happiness’? For power. . .” Taking as its point of departure Nietzsche’s suggestion that a “will” might be discoverable... more

Voices of the ‘Other’ in the Discourse on the Partition of India

Organizer: Sarbani Banerjee

In the last decade, Partition literature has witnessed the emergence of a wide range of scholarship that examines the historic event in all its complexity. To cite an example, Kavita Daiya studies... more

Slavic Scars: Representing Trauma in Russia and Eastern Europe

Organizer: Drago Momcilovic

From Tadeusz Borowski’s short stories about the Holocaust to Svetlana Alexievich’s recently published oral history of the Chernobyl disaster, individual and collective traumas have been recurring... more

Comparative Populism: Literatures, Media Cultures and the Formation of Collective Identities

Organizer: Luigi Patruno

The rise of new forms of populism has reoriented scholarly interest in the study of nation-building, the production of collective identities, and the craft of political hegemony. Once deemed to be an... more

Transborder Adaptations: Film Adaptations in the Hispanic Contexts

Organizer: Sohyun Lee

From its inception, adaptation studies as discipline has been floating between traditional literary studies and the field of film studies. Due to its interdisciplinary nature and the need to juggle... more

Aesthetic Practice and the Political Imagination

Organizer: Cynthia Gao

The anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggles of the Long 60s tend to be posed in contradistinction to social movements that have organized in response to neoliberalization. This distinction runs... more

Feminist Textualities in the Urban Novel

Organizer: Geetha Ramanathan

This seminar seeks papers that reflect on the relationship between the urban environment and women], as portrayed in fiction. We are interested in works written by women that could properly be... more

Belonging in French- and German-speaking Literatures. A Transnational Approach

Organizer: Michel Mallet

Belonging in French- and German-speaking Literatures. A Transnational Approach Michel Mallet (Moncton, NB), Timo Obergöker (Chester, UK) Questions related to the sentiment of belonging have... more

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