Seminars

Intersections between Race/Caste and Religion in Literature

Organizer: Ali Ahsan

The intersection between religion and race may seem unlikely at first, but history shows a continuous pattern where religion aligns with social hierarchies like race and caste. Geraldine Heng (2018)... more

Aesthetic Approaches to the Qur'an and Islam

Organizer: Pardis Dabashi

Building from efforts within Islamic studies, Qur’anic studies, and literary studies, this seminar invites papers that examine the question of aesthetics, broadly conceived, in and around the Qur’an... more

GROWING UP IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: CHILDREN AGENCY AND WORLD-MAKING IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Organizer: Marco Ramirez Rojas

This CFP is open for contributions that look at modern and contemporary literary representations of children and young adults across the various areas of the Global South. Engaging with the surge of... more

The Persistence of Existentialism

Organizer: Ben Roth

Existentialism never had much influence on Anglo-American philosophy. Peaking perhaps with Thomas Nagel’s 1971 article “The Absurd,” it has more often been sneeringly dismissed, or simply... more

Situation and Narrative Form

Organizer: Marcie Frank

At once a distillation of the essential shape of a narrative and a prompt for producing that shape in the first place, situation is a useful term for both the interpretation and the production of... more

Giving Up: Literature, Criticism, Politics

Organizer: Carson Hammond

Adam Phillips’ recent book On Giving Up comes at a moment of widespread exhaustion. Whether the latter is measured in terms of depression diagnoses, symptoms of cultural-aesthetic stagnation,... more

Mimesis in a Global and Historical Context

Organizer: Samuel Hodgkin

Mimesis is a fundamental way of conceiving of the relationship between artistic expression and reality in Western thinking. It has been theorized in depth in the western context over the centuries... more

Unpredictable Architectures: The Aesthetics and Politics of Gardening in Latin America

Organizer: Valeria Meiller

Considered either as material landscapes or symbols, gardens are usually thought of as spaces where nature is enclosed and controlled. They continue to live behind walls that separate them from the... more

Scale, Form, and Urban Crisis: Literature and the City

Organizer: Eric Prieto

This seminar seeks to build on and contribute to the growing body of theory and criticism situated at the intersection of literary studies and urban studies. Following the lead of literary critics... more

Seeing Periodicals through Translation & Gender

Organizer: Anna Learn

Since the 19th century, discourses of translation and gender have played out in the “radical[ly] heterogeneous” pages of periodicals (Liggins, 612). While Francesca Orsini and others have begun to... more

Dissident Writing, the Cold War, and the Decolonizing World

Organizer: Peter Kalliney

Dissident writers and repressive states are ubiquitous features of the long Cold War. During the second half of the twentieth century, literature became a fiercely contested site as writers faced... more

Fugitive Modernities: South African Modernism and the Global Mind in Crisis

Organizer: Bogdan Andrei

This paper explores South African modernism within the broader framework of global modernity, focusing on how it responds to and critiques the crises of consciousness and identity that have... more

Odd Temporalities

Organizer: Juan Meneses

At one level, power is about the control of time. This is not so much a question of “what happens when?” but, rather, of deciding “when do things happen?” While this is a strategy of direct control,... more

Poetics and the Problem of Consciousness

Organizer: Hayley Cotter

This session seeks papers that investigate poetic interiority through the lens of philosophical problems of consciousness. Specifically, it envisions work that probes the ways poetry, as a genre,... more

Brazilian Literature in English: Cross-Cultural Dialogues and Polysystemic Perspectives

Organizer: Carolina Magaldi

Brazilian literature, rich in cultural diversity and literary innovation, has increasingly gained recognition on the global stage. As Brazilian works are translated into English, they not only cross... more

Between Deleuze and Literature: Imagining Literature’s Images of Thought

Organizer: Adam Mohamed

Deleuze notes in Negotiations that he did not have the chance to write “the book [he’d] like to have done about literature” as he had done for other artforms like cinema and painting. Following... more

Ethnography and/as Literature: Content, Context, and Comparisons

Organizer: Moira Weigel

This seminar will explore ethnography as a method of studying literature—as well as a literary genre. How do literary scholars constitute our objects? As a field, we do not tend to talk... more

Book Censorship and the Politics of Literature

Organizer: Johs Rasmussen

During the last obscenity trial involving a text-only medium in the United States, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that William Burrough’s novel Naked Lunch (1959) was “not... more

Realism, Globalization, and Cosmopolis

Organizer: Didier Coste

This seminar addresses questions about realism’s aesthetic and political implications from a global perspective. The genre of the novel is said to have spread all over the world at the time of the... more

Girlhood Aesthetics: Coming of Age in the Cultural Imaginary

Organizer: Amanda Greer

Girlhood art, literature, and media have often been discussed via representational analysis, staking moralizing claims by labelling some representations “good” and others as “bad” for an imagined... more

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