Seminars

Readings of Our Own: English Literatures in Other Accents

Organizer: Davi Pinho

All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until the taxis are dancing with the... more

Baroque Temporalities: Form and Afterlives

Organizer: Nicholas Fenech

The purpose of this seminar is to develop new insights into the Baroque from the perspective of how it casts temporality. This is a critical dimension of what we now refer to as the historical... more

Time and the Global Contemporary in Hebrew Literature

Organizer: Oded Nir

Explorations of temporality in literature, Hebrew literature included, are nothing new. But so far there have been very few attempts to think about temporality in Hebrew literature in the context of... more

Global Theatre’s Many Publics: World Drama and Performance in the Undergraduate Curriculum

Organizer: Glenn Odom

Efforts to internationalize the theatre and performance studies curriculum in the Western academy promise to richly enhance our understanding of a diverse array of cultures. New scholarship on... more

Toward a Chicana Decolonial Reading of Autobiographical Writings by Egyptian Women, 1950s-2000s

Organizer: Asmaa Mansour

Postcolonialism as a literary period emerged as an intellectual movement consolidating and developing around the ideas of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak and is mainly concerned with... more

New Perspectives on the Indian New Wave: Fifty Years On

Organizer: Manishita Dass

Our seminar revisits an extraordinary but neglected moment in Indian film history and the history of global art cinema, extending from 1969 to the 1980s, when a constellation of alternative film... more

Radical Representations: Exploring Indigenous and Minority Languages in the Artistic and Literary Realms

Organizer: Eliza Smith

This seminar focuses on minority and indigenous languages in poems, memoirs, novels, and reference works, and the ways in which writers represented marginalized identities (either their own identity... more

Global Decolonization in the Art and Literature of the Americas

Organizer: Scott Challener

This seminar aims to create a cross-disciplinary conversation among scholars working at the intersections of Latin American, Latino/a/x, Caribbean, and hemispheric studies. We invite papers that... more

Genres of Climate Violence

Organizer: Joshua Clover

Despite the conventional association of “green” activism with pacific political action, and of climate policy with at most something like “slow violence,” the last year has made visible the more... more

Post-Political Critique and Literary Studies

Organizer: Juan Meneses

This seminar seeks papers that reflect on the analytical bridges that might exist between post-political theory and literary studies. The main question the seminar aims to answer is the following:... more

Deconstruction, Literature, and Singularity: Against Fascist Mythologies

Organizer: Tyler Williams

In 1958, while doing his military service at Kolea, Derrida writes to his friend Lucien Bianco: “Fascism will not pass […] never had my faith and my fear as a democrat seemed so very ‘gross’, and the... more

The Archive and the Gap: Reframing the History of Racialized Identities in the Americas

Organizer: Karina Sembe

Throughout the history of the Americas, racialized identities, framed as “subhuman” for the benefit of sovereignty, were homogenized in many ways—from redefining the space according to the... more

Queer Pragmatics

Organizer: Adam Sax

In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz argues that “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” Muñoz’... more

“Bares, qué lugares.” In/outside Bacchus’ kingdom.

Organizer: Almudena Marin-Cobos

Co-organizers: Irene Domingo Sancho (University of St. Thomas) Carmen Moreno Díaz (St. Olaf College) Almudena Marín Cobos (Columbia University) Anyone thinking of traveling to... more

The Knowledge of Art

Organizer: Robert Lehman

Do works of art—works of architecture, painting, literature, and so on—provide a distinctive way of knowing the world? Do they shed a kind of light on human practices that works of philosophy or... more

Creative Nonfiction Writing

Organizer: Dibakar Pal

Creative Nonfictions are invited for presentation in the ACLA conference 2020.

Experiences of the Un/Fulfilled: Specters, Hopes, and Frustrations in Latin American Aesthetics

Organizer: Gustavo Quintero

This seminar explores how spectral figures intervene in and shape aesthetic processes that center on the Latin American social and political domain during the twentieth and twenty first century. Our... more

Russia and Japan: Beyond West and East

Organizer: Olga Solovieva

This interdisciplinary seminar invites scholars of Japan and Russia to address the topic of Russo-Japanese cultural relations as a challenge to traditional binary views on the exchange of knowledge... more

Widening the Narrows: Straits and the Oceanic Turn

Organizer: Maxwell Uphaus

Over the last decade, the “oceanic turn” has moved oceanic space from the margin to the center of literary scholarship. However, this new ocean-centric scholarship has tended to blur the diversity of... more

Comparative Culture and Queer Postcolonialisms: In Dialogue with Sara Ahmed

Organizer: Catalina Esguerra

When did become “feminism” become a word that not only spoke to you, but spoke you, spoke of your existence, spoke you into existence? -Living a Feminist Life (Sara Ahmed, 2017) When interviewed... more

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