Skip to Content

Seminars

Aural Ecologies: Sound Sense and Translatency

Organizer: Rebecca Saunders

This seminar examines the resonant relationships among translation, sound, and sense (as both faculty and meaning) and pays particular attention to: the temporality and “translatency” of sound: of... more

ACLA Undergraduate Seminar "Bad Readers"

Organizer: Karyn Ball

From Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, literature teems with warnings about the perils of “bad reading... more

How to Do Theory with Examples

Organizer: Dylan Furcall

Is an example something one finds or something one makes? We often take for granted that writers passively find examples out in the world to provide a persuasive concreteness where theory feels... more

Watery Graves: Liquid Remembrances and Antiquity

Organizer: Tommaso Bernardini

The flood in Ovid’s Metamorphoses drowns the world; in the Odyssean Charybdis, we find the sea consuming not only men but also itself.  The destructive force of oceanic currents lingers in... more

Australia and . . .

Organizer: Brenda Machosky

Australian literature is not widely known outside of Australia, with the exception of the occasional film, international prize-winning book or television series. For this organizer, Comparative... more

Difficult Diasporas

Organizer: Amrita Mishra

The concept of “diaspora” in global north contexts often invokes communities or bodies marked by the broad category “people of color,” a category scholars such as Jasbir Puar and Anne Anlin Cheng... more

The Culture of Human Rights

Organizer: Muhammad Waqar Azeem

Sophia A. McClennen and Joseph R. Slaughter in “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms” warn: “Human rights are under threat everywhere, especially when the language of human rights is used to... more

Modernism, Religion, and Empire

Organizer: Apala Das

Traditionally, modernism has been thought of as a cluster of aesthetic movements emerging out of a declared crisis of faith. An expanded notion of modernism should therefore take into consideration... more

South Asian Digital Humanities

Organizer: Zunaira Yousaf

Roopika Risam in her New Digital Worlds (2019) argues that the postcolonial digital pedagogy aims to show “how print culture has played a role in constructing a world that privileges the... more

Thinking Modern Epic

Organizer: Benjamin Paul

What can be said about epic today? Although M.M. Bakhtin famously declared the impossibility of epic in a modern, polyphonic world in 1941, the category has remained a dynamic source of artistic and... more

Theoretical Models for a World on Fire

Organizer: Mathias Nilges

As global climates change, ecosystems collapse, and species disappear in human rather than geological time, responses to these changes have become increasingly inconceivable. Several theorists,... more

Sketching the Anglo-Persianate

Organizer: Fatima Burney

This seminar invites scholars working at the intersection of Global Anglophone and Persianate studies to consider Anglo-Persianate as a framework for interrogating the meeting ground of these two... more

Pages