Seminars

The Atomic Now: Aesthetics and Technopolitics of the Nuclear Age

Organizer: Anne-Gaëlle Saliot

The nuclear renaissance has arrived. Today is marked by the increased greenlighting of nuclear energy projects, a nearly unparalleled inching towards possible nuclear Armageddon with the war in... more

Exospheres: Politics, Aesthetics, and Narratives of Contemporary Outer Space

Organizer: Jessica Copley

While recourse to outer space as a site for utopian thinking has long been a familiar feature of speculative genres, the recent resurgence of interest in Russian Cosmism, enduring vitality of... more

Latinx Literary History as Comparative Literature

Organizer: Laura Lomas

The forthcoming three-volume book series, Latinx Literature in Transition (Cambridge University Press), introduces texts ranging from the fifteenth through the twenty-first century, and drawing upon... more

From Fait Divers to “Fake News”: Fictions of Race Between Mass Media and Literature

Organizer: Olivia Harrison

The status of truth in journalism is an object of growing attention and concern. One of many common strategies of mis- and dis-information is the amplification and distortion of minor news stories... more

Iqra’*: The Qura’nic Intertext in Comparative Literature: Palimpsest and Affect

Organizer: M.A.R. Habib

Reading literature, we often come across references to sacred texts, either featured as epigraphs or meshed into texts in subtler ways. Palimpsestic intertextuality suggests that texts contain traces... more

Translation and Feeling

Organizer: Marie Ostby

How does it feel to translate a text from its native language into another that is foreign to it, or to translate words composed by someone else into one’s own idiom? Arthur Sze describes the... more

Dewdrops on Embers:Deconstructing the Chequered Tropes of Existential Agonies in Contemporary Arab American Poetry

Organizer: Rakhi Vyas

Dewdrops on Embers : Deconstructing the Chequered Tropes of Existential Agonies in Contemporary Arab American Poetry ... more

Thinking the “Unthinkable World”: Theories of Horror, Horrors of Theory

Organizer: Saul Anton

In the fun-house of contemporary horror films and literature, our world manifests as an exhibition of atrocities—ecological catastrophe, capitalist exploitation, unbridled violence, thinking machines... more

Mixed Messages from Projects of (Personal) Discovery

Organizer: Travis Landry

This seminar examines the place of personal discovery in today's scholarship. Shadowed by the pandemic and concerned about an assault on the humanities, the field of literary studies nevertheless... more

Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa

Organizer: Hoda El Shakry

In a 2015 multimedia manifesto titled “Towards Arabfuturism/s” the Jordanian artist Sulaïman Majali writes that “Arabfuturism/s, like most creative provocations, is born of counter-culture” in which... more

La culture, un outil de lutte contre le tabou de l’homosexualité dans le monde arabe

Organizer: Samar CHENOUDA

Le film franco-marocain-belgo-danois Le Bleu du Caftan de Maryam Touzani et Nabil Ayouch est sorti en France en 2022. Il aborde, par le biais de la fiction, la réalité de l’homosexualité masculine au... more

Caribbean Sites and Sounds

Organizer: Charlie Hankin

The articulation or (as Édouard Glissant put it) “confrontation” between the oral and the scribal has long figured as a fundamental trope in Caribbean writing. From Juan Francisco Manzano’s practice... more

ACLA