Seminars

Transnational Arabic Studies

Organizer: yasser elhariry

What do the words Arab and Arabic mean today? What have they meant historically? What continuities and ruptures do they signify in contemporary discourses of the Middle East? In a world where... more

Unfinished : The Theory and Praxis of Incompletion

Organizer: Madeleine Reddon

This seminar examines theories of “unfinishedness” that pose the question of incompletion as a critical aspect of literary praxis as well as an interpretive gesture. In doing so, we seek to... more

Slavic "Others": Inhuman, Nonhuman, Posthuman

Organizer: Drago Momcilovic

The “other” is a central conceit in both canonical and contemporary Slavic & East European literature and the arts. Archetypal characters like Tchaikovsky’s swans, Čapek’s robots, Tokarczuk’s... more

Cuba’s alternative public spheres: rehearsals of the island that could be

Organizer: María Isabel Alfonso

In response to Cuba’s permanent economic crisis, the Cuban people have developed alternative and informal practices to find solutions to the daily challenges they face. While a few decades ago... more

Franchise Cultures

Organizer: Benjamin Robertson

The term “franchise” has long refered to a production model that develops a consistent storyworld in order to leverage this world indefinitely as intellectual property. The James Bond films provide... more

De-centering book technologies and scholarship of the "outside"

Organizer: Tim Roberts

The centrality of the book form for scholarly production is rarely if ever questioned. Many if not all existing publishers and publications continue to adhere exclusively to the book or journal... more

Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literatures and Film from Asia

Organizer: Antara Chatterjee

As we gradually emerge from the latest infectious disease pandemic that hit the world in 2020, this seminar seeks to refocus attention on and reevaluate the impact of another infectious disease that... more

(Re-en)gendering Intertextuality: Queer pasts and futures (a seminar sponsored by the ICLA Gender Studies Committee)

Organizer: Tegan Zimmerman

This seminar seeks to revisit/ reassess one of our discipline’s foundational concepts, intertextuality or intertextualité as Julia Kristeva first conceived it, in the current context of climate... more

Episodes from the Morphological History of the Novel

Organizer: Nicholas Paige

Papers sought for a seminar on formal change in the novel, from whatever period. Diachronic narratology, the history of the book, and Digital Humanities have been slowly modifying our understanding... more

A Comparative Study of Narrative Art Between the Sound and the Fury and Life and Death Are Wearing Me out

Organizer: Meng Wang

Faulkner and Mo Yan are both writers who pay attention to the writing of narrative art and the exploration of artistic forms of works. Mo Yan admits that the narrative art of his... more

BL: Queer Vernaculars in World Literature

Organizer: Cheng-Chai Chiang

This seminar proposes a collaborative theorization of Boys Love (BL), a transnational Asian media phenomenon conventionally associated with adolescent heterosexual female fan subcultures who create,... more

Violence and Affects in Latin America

Organizer: Alicia Rios

During the 1990s, feminist, gender, sexualities, queer and trans cultural studies have been theorizing affects as a way out of the believed impasse generated by post-modern psychoanalytic and... more

Cosmopolitics and Cosmopoetics

Organizer: Gabriel Trop

Recent responses to the intensifying urgency of political, economic, cultural, and existential crises have turned to cosmological thinking as an experimental site in which to initiate a wholesale... more

In Other Words: Solidarity, Betrayal, and Translation in the Global South

Organizer: Haider Shahbaz

The study of the Global South has now become a key fixture in contemporary comparative literature debates (Halim 2012, Shih 2013, Popescu 2020). Yet, most conversations continue to center English and... more

Formal Innovation in Small Literatures

Organizer: Andrea Cabajsky

The seminar organizers seek proposals that investigate connections between theme and form in small literatures. We are particularly interested in receiving proposals that focus on formal innovation... more

Waiting for Godard. A Marxist-Formalist Facade in Two Acts

Organizer: William Thomas McBride

To mark the occasion of the assisted suicide death of New Wave's premiere theorist and practitioner, Jean-Luc Godard, I invite papers and proposals that take up the dialectical relationship between... more

Asian/ and Asian American Representations on Screen

Organizer: Yu Min (Claire) Chen

Since Lumière brothers' first films debuted in Paris in 1895, motion pictures have evolved and advanced from early silent, black and white film to today’s use of 3D and new technology.... more

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age, Sec. 1

Organizer: B. Venkat Mani

The aim of this seminar is to spark a discussion on the significance of literary comparisons in and for the twenty-first century. With David Damrosch's Comparing the Literatures (2020) at its center... more

Aging and Ageisms across European Enlightenments

Organizer: Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti

Old age is less the result of a biological reality, than the by-product of a cultural and social construction. Each culture and society determines its age and rites of passage relative to specific... more

Literatures of Transnational Race/Critique

Organizer: Taylor Johnston-Levy

Since the 2020 global resurgence of Black Lives Matter, race critique has been disparaged as an unwanted American export. European politicians, for example, attribute demonstrations against police... more

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