Seminars

Beyond Backwardness: Revisiting Rural Spaces as Sites of Resistance, Renewal, and Radical Potential

Organizer: Brittany Frodge

Due to varied complex historical processes such as industrialization, urbanization, and colonization, the rural has often been articulated in literature and other cultural products as an... more

Cultures of Monoculture

Organizer: Amber Bal

Monocultural farming practices are indissociable from the transformations that characterize life in the 21st century: climate change, urbanization and the dematerialization of labor are but a few... more

Not Babel: When Translation is Much of the Same

Organizer: Thomas Genova

What are the implications of what Emily Apter has described as “linguistic nominalism, or what a language name really names when it refers to grammatical practices in linguistic territories” for... more

Undetermined Promising Futures

Organizer: Michael Anthony Turcios

That a promising future awaits us not too far has been rearticulated ad nauseum. Abstract, vacuous, and frequently unrealized, a promising future indefinitely extends precarity. To imagine a... more

Mysticisms in the Flesh: The Social Poetics of Nothingness

Organizer: Sally Hansen

In his essay, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” Fred Moten asks, “Can there be an aesthetic sociology or a social poetics of nothingness?” This seminar takes up Moten’s question,... more

Ethics and Aesthetics of Direct Climate Action

Organizer: Adam Hill

As the impacts of climate catastrophe worsen and the possibilities of systemic change remain improbable, spectacularized acts of civil disobedience play an increasing role in public debate on climate... more

Embodied aesthetic techniques: Ways of doing, learning, and critiquing

Organizer: Paulina Pineda

As people get their hair done, information is shared at the salon. At the loom, Indigenous weavers teach patterns to the young. With hands in the soil, sowers learn about raining cycles as they plant... more

(The Politics of) Writing Home: Language, and Identity in the Literature of Displacement

Organizer: Zaynab Ali

Destruction is transnational: homes, places of worship, healing and community are annihilated across borders. One factor remains that unites the varying images of destruction: regardless of race,... more

Lost in Austin: Critical Inheritances of a Philosophical Maverick

Organizer: Philip Mills

We are proposing an ACLA Seminar to convene, for the first time, the interdisciplinary community of scholars working on or in the spirit of J.L. Austin (1911–1960). Though widely, albeit often... more

Evolutions of Literary Theory: The Afterlives of New Criticism, Structuralism, and Others

Organizer: Katherin Yu

The publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, in some ways, marked the end of New Criticism. The two approaches—structuralism and New Criticism—represent two ways of seeing texts... more

Reception of War in Contemporary European Literatures

Organizer: Olha Voznyuk

The Russian full-scale invasion on Ukraine in 2022 brought back the question of war, its representation and reception in literature and culture in contemporary writing. In spite of the idea that war... more

Diagrams of writing. Design, ekphrastic and figural patterns in artistic and literary forms

Organizer: Thomas Symeonidis

Contemporary debates and research continue to investigate the various interrelations between the arts. “Communication”, “exchanges”, “encounters” between the arts, “interdisciplinarity”, “... more

Labor in Global Speculative Fiction

Organizer: Samuel Ginsburg

In their construction of possible futures and alternate realities, science fiction and other forms of speculative literature have often provided a space to reflect on the cultural and technological... more

After Caliban: Literary Education, Empire, and the “Global Anglophone”

Organizer: Laura Ritland

This seminar invites renewed analysis and debate about the educational institutions of English literature within the scope of British and US empire, especially (though not only) within the light of... more

Anti-Fascist Worldmaking

Organizer: Jessy Bell

Umberto Eco’s now-famed essay “Ur-Fascism” (1995) outlines fourteen characteristics of what he calls “Eternal Fascism,” noting that fascistic ways of thinking and cultural mores pulse with or without... more

The Flow of Performing Arts Between Periphery and Center: Tensions and Potentialities

Organizer: Carlos Gontijo Rosa

In 1931, Antonin Artaud envisioned a radically innovative form of theatre after witnessing a performance by a Balinese troupe at the Colonial Exposition in Paris. While this event is widely... more

Riverine Journeys: Discovering New Selves and New Tropes

Organizer: Doaa A Omran

Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” This perhaps epitomizes the concept of this seminar “Riverine Journeys:... more

Hegel and World Literature

Organizer: Carson Welch

The specter of Hegel looms large over contemporary scholarship. Debunking overhasty dismissals of Hegelian thought as vulgar panlogism or reductive teleology, recent work has presented Hegel as a... more

Energy Law and Literature

Organizer: Michael Malouf

An understudied area within the Energy Humanities has been the role of legal cases and policies in shaping many of its primary petrofictional texts and as an activist strategy in climate politics or... more

New Directions in Temporality Studies: Time and the Construction of the Racialized Gendered Subject

Organizer: Liz Rose

In the opening of Unpayable Debt (2022), Denise Ferreira Da Silva turns toward the temporality of modernity and its racialized gendered others, asking, “How to break this perverse circuitry” (13).... more

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