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Seminars

Thank you to everyone who proposed a seminar for our March 19-22, 2020 conference in Chicago. The Program Committee has made final decisions about seminars and all acceptance letters have already been sent.

Please use the search below to find your seminar for reference (we recommend searching using only one or two keywords for best results). If you have already received an acceptance email but do not see your seminar listed below this does not mean that the status of the seminar has changed. Contact info@acla.org with any questions.

Tides of Progress: Print Culture and Anglo-Hispanic Exchanges, 1880-1940

Organizer: Peter Hulme

In 1914, the editors of Puerto Rico’s Revista de las Antillas declared their intent to “speak in the Caribbean of world culture, and in the world of Caribbean culture”; in 1921, the US... more

Misogynist Aesthetics, Feminist Methods, and the History of Monotony

Organizer: David Carroll Simon

R. Howard Bloch’s 1991 monograph Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love is far from the most current entry in the scholarship on misogyny. Yet when Bloch notes the “... more

Reading in Theory

Organizer: Matthew Scully

Despite the proliferation of critical engagements with theories of reading by scholars of literary studies, it seems fair to say that relatively little has changed since Paul de Man claimed, “the... more

Forecasting: Scenarios for the Future

Organizer: Eva-Lynn Jagoe

The forecast is for 100-year storms and record-breaking temperatures to be the new norm. These daily and weekly predictions are microcosms of what is, in all likelihood, going to be a full-blown... more

Climate Change and Comparative Aesthetics

Organizer: Rebecca Oh

In 2016 Amitav Ghosh threw down a gauntlet: realism, he asserted, is not adequate to the task of representing climate change. As per the subtitle of The Great Derangement, it is “the unthinkable”... more

Ruins: Marvel, Horror, and Sublime

Organizer: Armando Maggi

What do we mean by ‘ruins’ today? Would it possible to claim that we have entered a new phase in our rapport with what we used to approach as remnants of the past? One of the basic premises of this... more

Socialist Side of World Literature

Organizer: Yanli He

This proposal invites scholars to address the connection between Socialist Realism(s) and world literatures within and beyond the Soviet Union and the Cold War. As I. Anisimov stated in 1959 that, in... more

Ordinary Language Philosophy and Literary Studies

Organizer: Matthew Nelson

Lately, scholarly interest in Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) has been on the rise. From special issues of New Literary History (2015) and MLN (2015) to monographs (e.g., Moi 2017; Habjan... more

Poetry's Exemplarity

Organizer: Walt Hunter

In this seminar, we invite participants to theorize poetry's exemplarity: what happens when we use a poem as an example in an argument? How are poems useful, felicitous/apposite,... more

Queer Cultural Production in the Contemporary Islamicate World

Organizer: Etienne Charriere

Despite widespread calls for increased critical attention to queer cultural production from the Global South, much scholarship still focuses on queerness as it is conceptualized in North American and... more

Translation as Reading

Organizer: Junjie Luo

When Gayatri Spivak (1993) discusses “translation as reading,” she focuses on the relationship that a translator establishes with the original text and its translation. This seminar examines the role... more

Translating Home I: Migration, Refuge, and Human Rights (organized by the ICLA Translation Committee)

Organizer: Isabel Gómez

The ICLA Translation Committee invites abstracts for 20-minute papers exploring ways in which translation informs conceptions of migration, refuge, and human rights and shapes notions of indigeneity... more

Quantitative Aesthetics

Organizer: Joan Lubin

How does literature count? Language and number appear as radically divergent, if not mutually exclusive, modes of representation. Their strategic separation not only frames our most fundamental... more

Mobilities, migrants, borders, and walls: the place of literary journalism in a world in motion

Organizer: Robert Alexander

What is the place of literary journalism in a world characterized by “interconnected and intensifying flows of people, animals, goods, information, and waste”? (Nancy Cook and David Butz, Mobilities... more

Anarchism and Culture

Organizer: Ania Aizman

Inviting interlocutors from a range of backgrounds and scholarly traditions, this seminar might consider canonized authors or anonymous zines, cult films or unknown archives, and works of art from... more

Emerging Sites and Future Forms: Literary Production in the 21st Century

Organizer: Sarah Brouillette

This seminar will study literary forms, sites, and practices that emerge in conditions where support for cultivation of the traditional literary sphere is waning. Indebted, prolonged austerity... more

The Glissant Variations

Organizer: Seulghee Lee

This seminar seeks to delineate the continued influence of Edouard Glissant in critical thought. Our aim is to approach Glissant’s various conceptual keywords—“opacity,” “relation,” “detournment,” “... more

World Theory

Organizer: Jeffrey Di Leo

Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have been undergoing of late a spectacular reorientation whose result has been the refocusing of entire fields, methodologies, and... more

The Global Lyric Project

Organizer: Andrew Hui

The lyric is back (or perhaps it never went away). Consider the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012), Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins’s Lyric... more

Economies of Entitlement and Complicity

Organizer: Anirban Gupta-Nigam

[This seminar proposal merges seminars originally entitled "Economies of Entitlement: From Droit du Seigneur to White Nationalism" and "Complicity"] This seminar investigates the intersections and... more

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