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Seminars

Thank you to everyone who proposed a seminar for our March 19-22, 2020 conference in Chicago. The Program Committee has made final decisions about seminars and all acceptance letters have already been sent.

Please use the search below to find your seminar for reference (we recommend searching using only one or two keywords for best results). If you have already received an acceptance email but do not see your seminar listed below this does not mean that the status of the seminar has changed. Contact info@acla.org with any questions.

The Shifting Temporalities of Documentary Film

Organizer: Maria G. Arenillas

Traditionally, documentary has been associated with memory, the fragmentary, and with remnants of the past. By foregrounding these temporalities, many filmmakers engage in a dialogue between past and... more

Modernism and Disability Aesthetics

Organizer: Rafael Hernandez

Recent work in the field of disability studies by scholars like Ato Quayson (2007), Tobin Siebers (2010), Maren Linett (2016), and Suzannah Biernoff (2017) has considered modernism’s appropriation of... more

Comparative Realisms

Organizer: Aaron Bartels-Swindells

It’s a commonplace to say that realism is having a moment again, or that realism has never left. This seminar recognizes both that realism is always important and that realist critical projects have... more

Configuring Trauma and Ideology in Representation

Organizer: Min Yang

Despite considerable research devoted to expanding our understanding of trauma beyond the unspeakable, which was conceptualized by trauma theorists in the mid-1990s, the nexus between trauma and... more

Revisions of Fascism II: Comparative Fascisms

Organizer: Sanders I Bernstein

In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton reminds us that fascism has always proved difficult to define. Fascism “seemed to come from nowhere.” Though it “took on multiple and varied forms” and “... more

Awkwardness

Organizer: Shirl Yang

To feel something is “awkward” is to verge on—without exactly arriving at— a judgment: it notes that a situation is uncomfortable without diagnosing what is responsible for that social impasse. (Here... more

Seduced Heroes, Seduced Readers

Organizer: Alexandra Schamel

Leo Tolstoy might have captured some metafictional truth about the profession of literature when he remarked at the beginning of Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is... more

Making Sense of Digitality

Organizer: Jacqueline Chia

Making Sense of Digitality   Erich Hörl defines the technological condition as a site where we make sense of the world today. Sensing—ways of seeing and being, and that which ultimately... more

Literary Diagnosis and the Anti-Medical Humanities

Organizer: Melanie Jones

With Health Humanities programs on the rise and medical memoirs flooding our bookshelves, it is easy to forget that the alliances forged between literary representation and medical discourse are new... more

The Storytelling of the Disaster

Organizer: Hiroki Yoshikuni

According to Walter Benjamin, “the art of storytelling is coming to an end”; we are losing “the ability to share experiences.” Without storytelling, which was once “a capability that seemed... more

Rethinking and Revaluing the Rhythmic

Organizer: Thomas Wisniewski

Rethinking and Revaluing the Rhythmic For John Dewey, writing in 1910, the history of philosophy was to be understood in terms of a rhythmic ebb and flow of theory and practice: one would recede in... more

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