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Seminars

Cardinal Points: Literatures of the Global South

Organizer: Alfred Lopez

To fly from Mexico City to New Delhi, one must make one or two stops in Europe; perhaps Schiphol or Munich. To read Rabindranath Thakur in Spanish, this volume’s editors must likewise ‘stop’ in... more

The Politics of Legibility, Lateness, Liberation

Organizer: Jorge Cartaya

Co-organized by Daimys Garcia (dagarcia@wooster.edu), Jorge Cartaya (jec454@cornell.edu), Ana Luszczynska (luszczyn@fiu.edu) This seminar explores the tension in registers of legibility and... more

Fragments for a History of the Legal Body

Organizer: Julie Stone Peters

Our era knows, perhaps better than any, that law’s construction of the human body matters: to our identities, freedom, subsistence, and much more. Law tells us what body parts we may display and what... more

Infrastructural Verse

Organizer: Michael Martin Shea

If the infrastructural turn in literary studies has found its privileged object in the novel (realist or otherwise), the history of poetic representations of infrastructure—from “Crossing Brooklyn... more

Eating your words: reception as consumption

Organizer: Phoebe Lakin

“The words of a dead man/ Are modified in the guts of the living.” In line with W.H. Auden’s visceral phrasing, our panel encourages participants to think about literary reception as a process of... more

Lyric Thinking

Organizer: Andrew Franta

This seminar is interested in how lyric poetry has been conceptualized and practiced as a distinctive form of thinking. The inquiry it proposes intersects with prior critical approaches to poetry’s... more

Structures of Change

Organizer: Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz

How is change structured? Or rather, under what terms can change be thought as structure at all? Does such a question require rethinking our conceptions of structure? Or of change? Catherine... more

Hospitality at the End of the World

Organizer: Penny Vlagopoulos

What can hospitality do in end times? The crises of the twenty-first century—climate change and ecological disaster, technological determinism, militarized conflicts and their devastating... more

Reading the Classroom

Organizer: Alexander Manshel

This seminar invites participants to consider the curricula, institutions, and pedagogies of literary studies as objects of literary analysis. As Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan have argued... more

Reading for and from the Hinterland

Organizer: Esther Peeren

This seminar proposes the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the present as inhabited by the legacies of colonialism, increasing labour precarity under late capitalist... more

Feminism and the Uses of Guilt

Organizer: Kimberly Anne Coles

Scholars working in identity-based fields have embraced a range of affective states—pride, shame, rage, irony, modesty, earnestness, and repair—as theoretically and politically productive affects.... more

Law and the Senses

Organizer: Yiorgos-Evgenios Douliakas

In the past years, scholars working in the field of Law and Literature have focused on the role of affect in shaping our sense of law and justice. Although law is supposedly the domain of Reason,... more

Reading Joy: The Praxis of Analyzing Good Feelings

Organizer: Janaka Lewis

American and Diasporic literature has examined trauma and mourning to a greater extent than we have contextualized joy, happiness, and celebration.  This may be due to the impact of feelings and... more

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