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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.

The Short Story's Global Dimensions

Organizer: Gavin Jones

The genre of the short story can seem compounded into a national narrative of emergence, theorization, and outsized importance in the United States. As Michael Collins has noted, the formal closure... more

A Glam Shame: Camp and Stigma

Organizer: Ian Fleishman

In celebration of WorldPride NYC, last month The Met published a two-part celebratory blog series on their ongoing exhibition, “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” Pushing back, as have so many others, against... more

Poetics from the Global South

Organizer: Nathan Suhr-Sytsma

“What if we posit that, in the present moment, it is the global south that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large?” Jean and John Comaroff, Theory from the South “Poetry... more

Baroque Temporalities: Form and Afterlives

Organizer: Nicholas Fenech

The purpose of this seminar is to develop new insights into the Baroque from the perspective of how it casts temporality. This is a critical dimension of what we now refer to as the historical... more

Genres of Climate Violence

Organizer: Joshua Clover

Despite the conventional association of “green” activism with pacific political action, and of climate policy with at most something like “slow violence,” the last year has made visible the more... more

Queer Pragmatics

Organizer: Adam Sax

In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz argues that “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” Muñoz’... more

The Knowledge of Art

Organizer: Robert Lehman

Do works of art—works of architecture, painting, literature, and so on—provide a distinctive way of knowing the world? Do they shed a kind of light on human practices that works of philosophy or... more

Russia and Japan: Beyond West and East

Organizer: Olga Solovieva

This interdisciplinary seminar invites scholars of Japan and Russia to address the topic of Russo-Japanese cultural relations as a challenge to traditional binary views on the exchange of knowledge... more

Widening the Narrows: Straits and the Oceanic Turn

Organizer: Maxwell Uphaus

Over the last decade, the “oceanic turn” has moved oceanic space from the margin to the center of literary scholarship. However, this new ocean-centric scholarship has tended to blur the diversity of... more

Realism as Theory I: Form and Phenomenon

Organizer: Erica Weitzman

This seminar — the companion seminar to “Realism as Theory II: Existence and Epistemology” — concentrates on how realism’s formal structures both reflect upon themselves and create modes in which “... more

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