Seminars

“They Called Me a Lioness”: Palestinian Girls Fight for Visibility and Freedom in Palestinian-American Muslimah Literature

Organizer: Hasnul Djohar

Arguably, although Edward Said’s Orientalism was published almost five decades ago, Muslimah or Muslim women have remained unseen and invisible in contemporary Anglo-American society. To question... more

What Is This “Black” in Global Black Literatures?

Organizer: Raquel Kennon

Following Stuart Hall’s provocation in his classic 1992 essay, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” this panel begins with its own “conjectural” moment as it seeks to explore “Global... more

Slow Violence in Vulgar Ground: Happenings in the Life of a Blind Girl

Organizer: Hao Sun

This paper examines the concept of slow violence as depicted in a Malaysian Chinese writer Li Zishu's novel "Vulgar Ground" (流俗地). The novel, set in Malaysia from 1969 to 2018, tells the story... more

Oceanic Humanities

Organizer: Sarah Senk

As traditional disciplines face questions of relevance and survival in an increasingly STEM-dominated academic landscape, Oceanic Humanities offers a new framework for understanding human experience... more

Alternatives to Narrative

Organizer: Nina Farizova

There is a growing awareness among Anglophone humanists that narrative as a meaning-making mode has been overemphasized. Having migrated from the study of the verbal arts into history, law, medicine... more

Representations of Addiction in U.S. Media: Discourses, Commodities, and Cultural Meanings

Organizer: Fernando Esquivel-Suarez

This seminar invites scholars to explore the complex and often contentious representations of addiction in U.S. media through a cultural studies lens, while critically questioning the... more

Un/apologetically Comparative

Organizer: Soyi Kim

Comparative studies are haunted by Eurocentric legacies and the assimilationist logic of globalization. Doing comparative work often means facing a wide range of “a violent severing, a forced fusion... more

Politics and Desire in the Archive

Organizer: Mercedes Trigos

This seminar invites papers that consider the methodologies of archival work and their potential connections to scholars’ fantasies of meaning, coherence, completion, and relevance. Archival... more

Revolt or Reinvention?: Citizenship in the Contemporary Literary Imagination

Organizer: Daniel Bergman

Is it time to stop fantasizing about citizenship? In a provocative 2022 essay, the political theorist Linda Bosniak answers in the affirmative: if the twenty-first century has been primarily defined... more

Migration, Speech and Literary Form

Organizer: Andrew Koenig

This panel takes as its jumping off point the centrality of unconventional speech in modernism, and the ways that speech is informed by migration. What forms of articulation become available at the... more

Toxic Exposure: Chemicals in Contemporary Global Fiction

Organizer: Alexandra Brown

Agrochemical use has long been a foundational tool to insulate plants against disease and improve yields in global agriculture, yet the 20th century brought with it a slew of changes to farming... more

Translation Futures

Organizer: Anandi Rao

Translators and interpreters in the digital age face manifold opportunities and challenges that are only compounded as Artificial Intelligence in the form of Large Language Models moves into the... more

Is “Outrage” Enough?: Sexual Violence, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Human Rights

Organizer: Billie Guarino

On August 9, 2024, a young female doctor was found brutally gang-raped and murdered at the R G Kar hospital in Kolkata, India. In the conversation about sexual violence inflicted on the female doctor... more

A Madeline on an English Tongue: The Influence of Migrating Literary Forms

Organizer: Jonathan Moreland

Walter Benjamin’s view that the translator’s task is to "expand and deepen their language by means of the foreign language" has most commonly been understood in semantic terms. However, contemporary... more

Breath Poetics

Organizer: Mae Losasso

There is a long history across traditions linking rhythms of breath to poetic formation, inspiration, invocation, and voice. More recently, the term ‘breath poetics’ has come to refer to a particular... more

The “Hard Problem”: Minds and (Un)Consciousness in Speculative Literature

Organizer: Kiel Gregory

David Chalmers directs our attention toward an interesting conundrum: “Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about... more

Literary Studies Beyond the Academy

Organizer: Simone Murray

Academic literary studies of the early 20th century began by emphatically dissociating itself from popular literary-cultural institutions: periodical book reviewing; mail-order book clubs; and the... more

More-Than-Human Poetics and Worlding

Organizer: Hsinmei Lin

Worlding, to make or build a world, remains a main objective in the practice of geocriticism, a method of literary analysis or theory that incorporates the study of geographical space. A... more

What is in Plain Sight?

Organizer: Miryam Segal

What keeps us from seeing something hiding in plain sight? Literary critics, like the hero of a detective story, need a puzzle to solve, a question to answer, an elision in the text, an impossible... more

Attending To: Regard and Care

Organizer: Victoria (Tia) Glista

To regard means to look, view, sense, or pay attention to something in a specific way. Its emergence from the French “garder” (to keep) underlines its active quality, as well as the incorporative... more

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