Seminars

Comparative Literature's Cold War

Organizer: Cate Reilly

What is the place of Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies in the comparative literary inquiry? Of comparative literary inquiry, with its emphasis on theory and the critical praxis of the left... more

Infrastructure(s) & Storytelling: Rethinking Contexts, Connections, & Erasures

Organizer: Rini Tarafder

Infrastructures, both visible and invisible, are all around us and they permeate our lives in various ways. Larkin defines infrastructures as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people... more

Web3 and the Question Concerning Technology

Organizer: Neta DAO Academy

Digital technologies have transformed our personal lives as well as our political, economic, and social contexts. The Internet-ization (if not the internationalization) of the world by technology has... more

James Baldwin and the Eruption of the Ethical

Organizer: Bill Johnson-González

In interview footage from 1963 curated by Karen Thorsen for The Price of the Ticket (1989) there is a scene wherein James Baldwin makes a claim about value: “From my point of view, no label... more

Varieties of the Impersonal

Organizer: Elias Kleinbock

Impersonality has long been invoked as a marker of modernity and of its literary-aesthetic correlate in modernism: anonymity and ennui appear as symptoms of urbanization and bureaucracy; modern... more

Towards a Global Discourse: The “Ethical Turn” in Western and Arab-Islamic Thought

Organizer: Bouchra Benlemlih

Since its inception in the 1990s, the “ethical turn” has laid the groundwork for the exploration of the ethics and politics of representation. Literature stands out as one of the primary cultural... more

Aesthetics and Ethics of the Fragment in Remembering and Forgetting Historical Violence

Organizer: Jeanne Devautour Choi

From civil wars to military dictatorships, from global conflicts to racial, religious, or ethnic genocides, historical violence, in its many forms, fractures societies, deepens divisions, and leaves... more

Powers of the Inhuman: Representations of the Working Class in the New International Division of Humanity

Organizer: Marcela Romero Rivera

Vijay Prashad, from the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, recently proposed that the genocidal wars and policies that define our political moment as hyper-imperialist affect not only the... more

“Beyond Social Death?”: Afro-Pessimism in Literature, Film and Television

Organizer: Badreddine Ben Othman

This seminar aims to explore literary texts, films and television productions which adopt or challenge Afro-Pessimistic visions of Black life in a systemically anti-Black world. It asks whether Black... more

A PLANETARY TEXT. NOTES ON SPOKEN WORD POETRY, RADICAL IMPROVISATION AND UNIVERSALITY

Organizer: F.M. Ceci

This panel seeks to explore the intersections of spoken word poetry and radical improvisation in music, considering how both practices function as tools of liberation, subversion, and radical... more

Documentary Fever

Organizer: Rosana Hernández

In the short story “Documentary Novelist,” by Argentinian author Sergio Chejfec, the narrator tries to explain to a hotel worker his determination to have his picture taken with the hotel’s macaws: “... more

Literature and International Development

Organizer: Susanna Sacks

“Literature, whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality…What better preparation can a people desire as they begin their journey into the strange,... more

Extractivism and Nation Building in the Long Nineteenth Century

Organizer: Nicolás Sánchez-Rodríguez

The term extractivism describes an economic model based on the circulation of non-renewable "natural" resources to world market metropolises from territories regarded as peripheral. As a practice and... more

Ciné-Poetics of Time in the Global South

Organizer: Marie Huber

If poetry, as Maurice Blanchot writes, is that which always eludes philosophical questioning, what philosophy of history could emerge from thinking with the poetic cinemas of the Global South?... more

The An-Arché of Language: Embracing Chaos, Complexity, and Non-Productivity in Translation

Organizer: Paula Cucurella

In contemporary translation theory, two predominant perspectives shape the discourse: one posits that universals are translatable across languages through various foundational models, while the other... more

Modernism in the Twenty-First Century

Organizer: Chris Gortmaker

Can the modernism genie truly be sequestered in its twentieth-century bottle? This seminar invites papers that explore the possible persistence of aesthetic modernism in twenty-first century... more

Comparative Literature beyond Epistemic colonization:

Organizer: Metin Boşnak

Undoubtedly, the concepts of decolonization and postcolonialism emerge from a profound discontent with the dominant paradigms of Western, male, and white literatures that have dictated the generation... more

Unreliable Narration in Nineteenth- To Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Organizer: Carlo Arrigoni

Following Wayne Booth’s articulation of the notion in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), unreliable narration has been a long-standing topic of discussion in literary theory and criticism. Definitions... more

The Ends of the Road: Rethinking the Borders of the Picaresque

Organizer: Emily Mulvihill

The picaresque has largely fallen out of vogue in literary studies. Nevertheless, the genre has long shaped the study of many of the world’s major literary traditions. So, what happens if we rethink... more

Relationality in Queer/Trans Asian/American and Asian Diasporic Cultural Forms

Organizer: stef torralba

Since its inception, the interdisciplinary field of queer of color critique has recalibrated commonplace understandings of ethnic and racial difference by foregrounding the imbricated relations... more

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