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Seminars

Poetic Voice in the Expanded Field

Organizer: Steven Maye

The poet’s voice has long been an elusive object in literary studies. It has been understood as both a biographical substrate and a commodity the poet has to manufacture or develop over time. It can... more

Translation and Autotheory

Organizer: Jan Steyn

While the long-established publishing convention of the translator’s note or afterword has asked translators to provide short critical reflections on their practice, there has been a boom over the... more

Genealogies of World Comparatism

Organizer: Anca Parvulescu

The journal published in Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg, starting in 1877, Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, is considered the first journal of Comparative Literature. It functioned as... more

Simone de Beauvoir and the Lesbian

Organizer: Ruth Thrush

In 2020, philosopher Paul B. Preciado publicly criticised Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir for her interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir’s newly discovered novel, The Inseparables, as a novel about... more

Rethinking Literature Beyond the Frame of the Citizen

Organizer: Alexandra Lossada

As more countries are shifting to right-wing governments and nation-first policies, global cooperation needed to address pressing and interrelated issues, such as climate change and refugee crises,... more

Contemporary Asian Spy Literature and Cinema

Organizer: Lily Li

This panel invites papers on contemporary Asian spy literature and cinema from the late 20th century to the present. The enigmatic and dangerous espionage world in literature and cinema is always... more

Border Narratives, Border Aesthetics

Organizer: Evren Özselçuk

In the last two decades dominant approaches that view the border mainly as a marginal geopolitical site of exclusion have been seriously challenged both by migrants’ practices and by scholarly... more

Black Genres of Political Theology

Organizer: Andrew Santana Kaplan

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure, the... more

Safe as Houses: The Force of Law In & Outside of Home

Organizer: Cait Jones

In his dissent to the US Supreme Court’s 1968 Terry v. Ohio decision, Justice William O. Douglas warned, “we hold today that the police have greater authority to make a ‘seizure’ and conduct a ‘... more

Utopian Substances in and Beyond the Soviet Empire

Organizer: George Kovalenko

The utopian imagination that accompanied the Bolshevik revolution and the early years of Soviet rule sought to substantially transform not only ideas and relations between people, but the very... more

Toward a New Cultural Materialism

Organizer: Xuesong Shao

This seminar investigates material conditions and contradictions in and as cultural processes. In the mid-twentieth century, Raymond Williams argued for understanding culture as a process that... more

Comparative Indenture

Organizer: Rebecca Liu

This seminar draws on the global history of Asian indentured labor to explore the theory and method of “comparative indenture.” Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, European... more

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