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Seminars

Contemporary Asian Spy Literature and Cinema

Organizer: Lily Li

This panel invites papers on contemporary Asian spy literature and cinema from the late 20th century to the present. The enigmatic and dangerous espionage world in literature and cinema is always... more

Border Narratives, Border Aesthetics

Organizer: Evren Özselçuk

In the last two decades dominant approaches that view the border mainly as a marginal geopolitical site of exclusion have been seriously challenged both by migrants’ practices and by scholarly... more

Black Genres of Political Theology

Organizer: Andrew Santana Kaplan

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure, the... more

Utopian Substances in and Beyond the Soviet Empire

Organizer: George Kovalenko

The utopian imagination that accompanied the Bolshevik revolution and the early years of Soviet rule sought to substantially transform not only ideas and relations between people, but the very... more

Toward a New Cultural Materialism

Organizer: Xuesong Shao

This seminar investigates material conditions and contradictions in and as cultural processes. In the mid-twentieth century, Raymond Williams argued for understanding culture as a process that... more

Comparative Indenture

Organizer: Rebecca Liu

This seminar draws on the global history of Asian indentured labor to explore the theory and method of “comparative indenture.” Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, European... more

Broken Middles

Organizer: George Mather

Against the backdrop of a 21st-century addicted to ‘origins’ and ‘ends,’ this seminar uses the work of Gillian Rose (1947-1995) to explore the possibilities of ‘the broken middle’. Contemporary... more

Postcolonial Formalism in Context

Organizer: Arthur Rose

This seminar asks how we might integrate context as a formal category of postcolonial literature. We invite submissions that theorize and/or practice modes of criticism that read postcolonial culture... more

Beyond the Capitals of Decadence

Organizer: Florian Zappe

Beyond the Capitals of Decadence Since antiquity, the elusive concept of ‘decadence’—regardless whether defined as a socio-cultural phenomenon, an artistic movement, or as an aesthetic programme—... more

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