Seminars

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

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

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

Intersectional Crip Theory: (Re)presenting Intersections of Illness, Disability, and Madness with Gender and Sexuality

Organizer: Tegan Zimmerman

Crip theory emerged in the twenty-first century primarily from two interdisciplinary fields: queer theory and disability studies. From Gutter and Killacky’s 2004 collection Queer Crips and McRuer and... more

Don’t Stop Talking About Palestine

Organizer: Michiel Bot

People protesting the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians have been confronted with an enormous amount of censorship, ranging from the systematic murder of Palestinian journalists, university... more

Postcolonial Perspectives on Injustice and Memory in Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (2019) and Hisham Matar's The Return: A Memoir (2019)

Organizer: Walid Abdallah

This study investigates Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and Hisham Matar's The Return: A Memoir, both pivotal works from 2019, through the lens of postcolonial theory. These novels grapple with... more

Literature, Resource Extraction, and Settler Colonialism

Organizer: Isabelle Hesse

Scholarly interest in literary engagements with resource extraction and extractivism has grown exponentially over the last decade. Special issues (Textual Practice 25.3; Modern Fiction Studies 66.1)... more

Where are the New Sex Wars?

Organizer: Micol Bez

While the tensions within radical 1970-80 feminism(s) are often articulated in the belligerent vocabulary of the Sex Wars, post-#metoo feminism seems to fish in another —more liberal— conceptual pool... more

The Roaring of the Twenties: Modernity and the Energetic Turn

Organizer: Daniel Brandlechner

The 1920s are a period of profound social, cultural, and technological transformation across the globe. Known as the Roaring Twenties in the US, Goldene Zwanziger in Germany, años locos in Argentina... more

Caribbean Fiction and the Environment

Organizer: Carine Mardorossian

The environment in fiction is often discussed as a backdrop or "setting" that complements or reinforces characterization. This seminar will instead foreground this traditional background and explore... more

Mapping the Asian-Hispanic Borderland: Cultural Interactions and Hybrid Identities

Organizer: Miaowei Weng

The contact between Asia and the Hispanic world began in the second half of the sixteenth century with the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, marking the start of a rich history of movement,... more

How It’s Made: Image-texts, Identity, Interpretation, Intersections

Organizer: Katherine Kelp-Stebbins

This seminar will explore how print and digital conditions of publication inform the legibility, translation, and circulation of ethnic, racial, gender, and other identity markers. How do visual... more

Mediating the Illegible: Theory, Aesthetics, and Activism under Regimes of Capture

Organizer: Rijuta Mehta

This seminar explores the notion of “illegibility” in critical thought, popular culture, and activist media that respond to neocolonial-neoliberal regimes of minority recognition. In light of global... more

The Textuality of Contemporary (Body) Horror

Organizer: Noah Terrell

Despite its long and varied history, the infamous subgenre of body horror didn’t gain critical currency until the 1986 January/February volume of the journal Screen. Indeed, it was in this special... more

Forbidden Roads: Travel as Metaphor in Contemporary Eastern European Cultures and Literatures

Organizer: Margarita Marinova

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lifting of the iron curtain, for citizens of the former Soviet Bloc travel became an act of liberation and a symbol of finally overcoming the... more

METAMODERNISM AND THE FUTURE OF THEORY: A NECESSARY DISCUSSION

Organizer: Luis Gonzalez-Barrios

According to Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji, the metamodern is an extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism. Building on this premise, Jason A. Josephson Storm's recent work,... more

Displacing Academic Practices in the Ruins of the Neoliberal University

Organizer: Maddalena Cerrato

Rather than an acute crisis with the potential for a substantive renewal, the neoliberalization of the university has revealed and exacerbated a longer term condition of ruination whose effects have... more

Ghost Figures in World Literature

Organizer: Ido Fuchs

A ghost, Avery Gordon writes, “has a real presence and demands its due, your attention” (2008, Ghostly Matters). To answer this demand, our seminar invites submissions that turn their attention to... more

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