Seminars

Politics of Disclosure

Organizer: Anne Brancky

The past year has been marked by the intense social, political and discursive impact of movements of disclosure in the public sphere. In this seminar, we explore the public revelation of private... more

Responding to Violence: Hierarchies of Memorialisation in Post-colonial Africa

Organizer: Eloise Brezault

Literary-cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries has gone a long way to memorialise and represent international conflicts and instances of mass violence. From the “Rhodes Must... more

Ghostpitality I

Organizer: David Coughlan

What is the relation between the hospitable house and the haunted house? In a haunted house, who or what extends a welcome? Who invites whom in? When Jacques Derrida devoted his seminars to the... more

Ear to the Ground: On Foundation, Burial, Earthquakes, and the Languages of Extraction

Organizer: Shannon Dowd

The ground is the earth over which we walk and build, the earth that holds roots and bodies. Ground is also a principle or foundation, a point of departure—and perhaps a point of arrival—for an... more

Texts travelling beyond the West.

Organizer: Clarissa Vierke

Texts travelling beyond the West. The recent debate concerning World Literature has sparked again interest in the global circulation of texts. So far, however, the focus has mostly been on Western... more

Socialism and World Literature

Organizer: Daniel Pratt

Since the publication of The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels claim that “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous... more

Concretism: A Global Dialogue I

Organizer: Odile Cisneros

In 1960, Max Bill curated the exhibit “Concrete Art, 50 Years of Development” in Zürich. Showing work by over 100 participants from two dozen countries, he also positioned himself as leader of this... more

Gothic Childhood

Organizer: Katherine Henninger

From Jane Eyre to Gotham, from Harriett Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, children are featured in tales of Gothic horror, and Gothic... more

Rereading the Book of Nature

Organizer: Nicholas Huelster

The “Book of Nature,” a medieval idea that nature was a world of signs which could be read to understand the workings of God, is one whose structures continue to resonate today.... more

Crime Fiction and Global Spaces Part I

Organizer: Andrew Pepper

The transnational “turn” in crime fiction and studies of the genre has produced a new understanding of the complex interplays between crime, policing and security. Just as crime is increasingly... more

Latin America Today: The Violence of Accumulation

Organizer: Juan Leal

The main goal of our panel is to characterize the current articulation of violence and capitalist’s accumulation with the ongoing metamorphoses of sovereignty and modern political institutions, in... more

Realisms and Representations of the Real in Modern Iberian Theater and Performance

Organizer: David Rodríguez-Solás

Theater in Spain offers examples of both representation of the real and the inclusion of the ‘real’ on stage. From Martínez de la Rosa historical dramas, to Valle-Inclán’s esperpentos and García... more

World Literature and the Internationalization of Nationalism

Organizer: Sara Marzioli

The resurgence in the early 2000s of “World Literature” as a theoretical framework and institutional practice was coeval with another capacious category also prominent in the debates of those years:... more

Global Indigenous Literature and Human Rights

Organizer: Audrey Golden

In the decades following the ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), scholars across disciplines have begun considering the relationship between... more

Anticipatory Grief

Organizer: Kevin Vennemann

Anticipatory Grief The concept of anticipatory grief—mourning something before it has been lost—has had its greatest purchase in the discipline of academic psychology. In the clinical... more

Translating the Epic

Organizer: Peter Orte

This seminar is dedicated to exploring various ways that oral and literary epics have been translated over time, across different cultures and languages, or into different semiotic mediums, i.e. song... more

Tracing Poetics Beyond the Eurocentric Tradition (Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian, Turkish,...)

Organizer: Maha AbdelMegeed

This panel is a response to the dominant assumption that there is an unproblematic genealogy from Greek poetics and rhetoric to “pre-modern” and “modern” European poetics, one that marks the rich... more

How are Concepts Made?

Organizer: Keston Sutherland

Our title invokes Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1926 essay, “How are Verses Made?” in order to pose a question that links literary epistemology—what literature knows and how it knows it—to social life, in... more

Baroque Bodies and Representations of Modern Subjectivity

Organizer: Annaliese Hoehling

In her study The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (2000), Dalia Judovitz locates the body--conceptually and materially--as a historically- and culturally-bound entity that has,... more

On Length: The Long and the Short of It

Organizer: Lindsay Thomas

This seminar examines how questions of length matter to literary studies. Considerations like word count or reading time influence many practices in the circulation of texts, from publishability to... more

ACLA