Seminars

The Novel Under Pressure

Organizer: Gloria Fisk

As it circulates in English, the realist novel is a cultural artifact of the age of Enlightenment in Europe, which is to say that it is a cultural artifact of empire. But if the genre is underwritten... more

Comparative Ecotechnics

Organizer: Derek Woods

The world system needs a transition to green, renewable machines and infrastructures. Every day, politicians and activists work toward variants of the Green New Deal; entrepreneurs present new... more

Play and Playthings in South Asian Children’s Literature

Organizer: Titas Bose

Children’s literature and material cultures of childhood have always enjoyed a long-standing relationship. In Anglocentric contexts, it is well studied how toymakers and children’s book editors... more

The Power of Transnationality: Refugee Literature in Contemporary World Literature.

Organizer: Rebecca Ehrenwirth

The emergent field of refugee studies constitutes a timely and relevant project as our world moves toward a greater form of interconnected transnationality. In its technical expression within the... more

Diasporic Avant-Gardes Noir: Blackness, Innovation, Futurity

Organizer: Lauri Scheyer

Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry Research Center, Hunan Normal University (co-organizer) Duriel E. Harris, English, Illinois State University (co-organizer) Tracie Morris, Writers... more

Sex Negativity

Organizer: Marija Cetinić

Additional co-organizer: Tessel Veneboer, Ghent University Mladen Dolar insists that "speaking obliquely is the proper way to speak about sex" ("Running Wild," 90-91). Heeding the circumlocutionary... more

Unethical Comparisons: The Ethics and Limits of Comparison

Organizer: Başak Çandar

Comparison, the modus operandi of Comparative Literature, never ceases to spark controversy in all sorts of political and cultural scenarios. Since 2020, for instance, discussions comparing... more

Reading Marx globally

Organizer: Alwin Franke

Reading Marx globally “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so... more

Mediterranean Europe and/as the Global South

Organizer: Alexis Radisoglou

The organizers of this seminar invite papers that interrogate cultural imaginaries and broader theorizations of Mediterranean Europe both in its relationship to and as the Global South. We conceive... more

Oceanic (Dis)Orientations

Organizer: Kritish Rajbhandari

In Wild Blue Media (2020), Melody Jue theorizes the ocean as an environment for interpretation. Water’s "conceptual displacement" requires a rethinking of concepts, objects, and media. For... more

Beyond Modernity as a Queer Aesthetic Project

Organizer: Isabel von Holt

What comes after modernity? Numerous thinkers ranging from Jürgen Habermas and Bruno Latour to Walter Mignolo and Rita Segato have explored this topic, illuminating the landscape of late capitalism,... more

Ante-Disciplinarity and Black Study

Organizer: Seulghee Lee

This seminar aims to conceptualize ante-disciplinarity. Toward the end of “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), Zora Neale Hurston writes: “To those who want to institute a Negro theatre,... more

Methodologies of Literature and Science

Organizer: Naomi Michalowicz

When we employ the formulation “literature and science,” what work does the “and” do, exactly? What are the methodological choices, comparative tools, and shared presumptions collapsed into this... more

Anticolonial Poetics in Form and Performance

Organizer: Allison Gibeily

This seminar considers the political force of poetic form for anticolonial poets and poetries from multiple contexts. We understand poetic form to encompass everything from meter and rhyme, strophe... more

Aesthetic Agonisms

Organizer: John Brenkman

The association of aesthetic judgment with consensus, universality, taste, and value is widely disputed, often to the point of rejecting the concept itself. Can an agonistic conception reinvigorate... more

States of Trance/Trans

Organizer: Kendra Atkin

What is a state? We might think of the national institution, The State, as the organizing structure of modern sovereign power. To state something may also be to make a declaration, to sure something... more

Modernist Prolegomena

Organizer: Anna Torres-Cacoullos

As prefatory interventions, paratexts such as prologues, prefaces, preambles, dedicatory letters, and addresses to readers have largely been neglected by scholars of modernist literatures... more

Zero Results for Censorship: the Parallel erosion of the Archive and Democracy

Organizer: Maria Gracia Pardo

Zero Results for Censorship: the Parallel erosion of the Archive and Democracy Book banning and book burning are but the oldest and most spectacular displays of force and ideological supremacy that... more

Sitting with Discomfort and Bending Decolonial Mastery: The Affective and Transformative Possibilities of The Literary

Organizer: Miriam Sbih

Recent studies and pedagogical practices concerning the teaching of socially, politically, and emotionally difficult concepts (racism, colonialism, and sexism to name but a few) increasingly foster... more

Hearing Images, Reading Sounds in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures, Film, and Other Visual Arts

Organizer: Dianna Niebylski

This panel builds on literary studies, film studies, sound studies, studies of intermediality and cultural studies to explore the ways in which sound extends and even reframes our understanding of... more

ACLA