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Seminars

Literary Border Crossings

Organizer: Ioana Pribiag

What is the place of the literary today and what kinds of displacements are actively transforming this mode of expression? Prompted by these simultaneously aesthetic and sociopolitical questions,... more

Terms of Attachment: Reimagining Relationships to Language in Jewish Literature

Organizer: Eyal Bassan

The common historiographical narrative, according to which the problem of modern Jewish literature begins with a necessary and ideologically fraught moment of “language choice,” has been complicated... more

Reckoning with Race, Gender, Class and Imperialism: New Approaches to Southwest Asia and North Africa (or, the Middle East)

Organizer: Mariam Rahmani

Since the advent of the study of the so-called “Near East” during the rise of European imperialism as chronicled by Said’s Orientalism (1978), the study of cultural production of Southwest Asia (or,... more

The Language of Dying: Deconstructing the End of Life Across Languages & Disciplines

Organizer: Lakshmi Krishnan

This seminar aims to bring together scholars from different disciplines interested in end of life issues. How are death and dying represented across literary forms, in different cultures and... more

Imperial Kinships

Organizer: Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

How have empires managed, reinforced, or proscribed particular forms of kinship or intimacy in order to legitimate their rule? How are desires and intimacy shaped by coloniality, inter-imperial... more

Minor Aesthetics/Minor Archives/Comparative Literature

Organizer: Katarzyna Bartoszynska

Sianne Ngai locates her investigation into what she calls “minor aesthetic categories” within the postwar United States and Europe, and discovers three: the zany, the interesting, and the cute... more

Revisions of Fascism: History, Aesthetics, and Affect

Organizer: Sanders Bernstein

“The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life,” writes Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," thus placing aesthetics at the... more

Critical Ethnic Literary Studies

Organizer: Sunny Xiang

US ethnic literary studies occupy a peculiar disciplinary space between Critical Ethnic Studies and (English) literary criticism. Namely, it has been deemed too dematerialized for the former and too... more

"The Center of This or That Masterpiece": Nabokov's Lectures

Organizer: Elizabeth Geballe

Vladimir Nabokov is a staple figure for comparatists interested in translation, self-translation, and polyglot authors—in short, a looming presence in discussions of world literature. But Nabokov... more

Material Affinities

Organizer: Dominic Mastroianni

In this seminar we propose to explore the affinities of nineteenth-century American writers for specific natural materials, while considering the stakes and goals of our own affinities for their... more

After the Crash: Economic Crises and Narrative Sense Making in Literature, Film and other Media

Organizer: Jonas Nesselhauf

From Miles Kahler’s and David A. Lake’s proposal to describe the 2007/08 crisis with the metaphor of an “economic earthquake” to Joseph Vogl’s critical glance at the “spectrology” of political... more

The achievements of Suga Keijirō

Organizer: Doug Slaymaker

This stream responds to and assesses the achievements of Suga Keijiro (b. 1958-). Based in Japan, Suga’s activities are wide-ranging and multilingual. They are multifaceted and difficult to... more

Poe and the Political

Organizer: Karen Grumberg

It is a well-established fact that Edgar Allan Poe is a world author, influential far beyond the borders of the United States and the English language. Baudelaire’s translations of Poe’s stories,... more

Energy Transformations

Organizer: Elena Fratto

Energy is an intuitive concept in our daily lives. A synonym of vitality, dynamism, and power, it fuels every human enterprise from nutrition to creativity, and it manifests in all the various... more

Genre and Neoliberalism

Organizer: Paul Nadal

This seminar offers the study of genre as a way to take up Leigh Claire La Berge and Quinn Slobodian’s recent call to better articulate the differentia specifica of literary studies’ contribution to... more

Intermedia Poetics

Organizer: David Nowell Smith

Intermedia Poetics ‘Poetics’ as a discipline has evolved to incorporate apparently mutually incompatible elements: it now is used to describe both reflection through creative practice, and... more

Building New Worlds: Local Imaginaries of Global Politics

Organizer: Jason Bartles

In this seminar, we will explore literary and cultural discourses that imagine new worlds or articulate explanatory narratives from particular sites that have been affected by wars, revolutions and/... more

The Blood Stream of Science: Science and Politics in Latin American Modernity

Organizer: Brais D Leon

The notion of science as detached from society has been the focus of ongoing debates among scientists and sociologists alike. A recurrent position in this debate has been to think that the... more

Latinidad in a Globalized World

Organizer: Luz Angélica Kirschner

Scholars have challenged the democratic pretensions of the notion of Latinidad in the Americas and instead underlined its profoundly stratified and conflictive nature since the formation of colonial... more

Human Rights and Cultural Production in the Americas

Organizer: IRINA POPESCU

This seminar explores the connection between cultural production and human rights discourse in Latin America and within Latinx communities in the United States. The time frame can be wide, as can the... more

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