Seminars

Remembering the Future: (Re)Constructing Memory and Realities in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and the Balkans

Organizer: Thomas Jesus Garza

In Goodbye, Lenin (2003), the young hero Alex Kërner struggles to recreate the daily life of East German in his apartment to preserve the familiar and comforting environment of pre-unification Berlin... more

Postcolonial South-Asia: Interrogating Identities/Experiences

Organizer: Chinmay Pandharipande

In the Humanities, South Asia is usually understood as a set of plurilingual, multicultural nations. Each constituting nation is internally differentiated or socially stratified according to its... more

Policing Forms: Navigating Constraints in and of Literature

Organizer: Kaushik Tekur

This panel aims to address cultural questions concerning police power through the various methods that are central to literary studies. The panel pays attention to the many expressions of police... more

Literary Ruins: On the Crisis of Contemporary Institutions

Organizer: Daniel Runnels

This seminar will address the question of the ruinous state of contemporary institutions which have historically upheld liberalism and, broadly speaking, the coordinates of political modernity.... more

Collective Narratives and the Critical Medical Humanities

Organizer: Marta-Laura Cenedese

The illness narrative might arguably be the most prominent genre within medical and health humanities research, and the “narrative turn” of the 1990s certainly contributed to the rise of scholarship... more

Surplus Labour and World-Literature

Organizer: Josh Jewell

For Brazilian critic Antonio Candido, literature has the potential to grasp the peculiar “social dynamic” of a time and place (85). In other words, literary form has the ability to articulate social... more

Translation and Chinese/Sinophone/Sinitic Poetry

Organizer: Lucas Klein

China is, they say, a “nation of poetry.” Though poetry has been and remains important to the Chinese cultural identity, the statement can also be interrogated: what is “China”? what is a “nation”?... more

Sex Negativity II (We Have Never Had Sex)

Organizer: Marija Cetinic

Sex Negativity II (We Have Never Had Sex) Continuing from the 2023 Sex Negativity seminar in Chicago, this panel thinks through sex and negativity in relation to psychoanalytic theories of the... more

The Turks and Their Native Tongues: The Role of Literature, Media and the Arts in Their Healing/Túrúkler hem Onlarnîñ Ana Tíllerí: Bolarnîñ Șifasî úșún Edebiyatîñ, Mediyanîñ we Sanatlarîñ Yerí

Organizer: Taner Murat

For hundreds of years, the conquest and colonization from Eastern Europe to the Far East subjected the Turkish ethnic groups to permanent linguicide by their dominant others. At the beginning of the... more

Technicity and the Genesis of the Posthuman World in Literature, Film, Performance, Computational Media, and Critical Theory

Organizer: Jecheol Park

Although Heidegger proclaimed that the essence of technology is a bringing-forth or revealing (poiesis) of the world, he did not articulate what kind of world or whose world it brings forth. Given... more

South Asian Blue Humanities

Organizer: Antara Chatterjee

The sea has always inspired the human imagination in the form of travel narratives, poetry, plays, songs, fiction, films and other media. However, only recently has the ocean has become a critical... more

The Feuilleton and Modern Jewish Cultures

Organizer: Marina Mayorski

Since the late eighteenth century, the feuilleton has been one of the most popular and most controversial forms of writing in newspapers throughout the world. First published in France, feuilletons... more

Modernism, Religion, and Empire

Organizer: Apala Das

Traditionally modernism has been thought of as a cluster of aesthetic movements emerging out of a declared crisis of faith. An expanded or ‘global’ modernist studies has been slow to reckon with the... more

Critical Perspectives on Collaborative Translation

Organizer: Abrona Lee Pandi Aden

Translation, as we know of today, is majorly understood as a solitary and lonely activity. Such an impression regarding the act of translation, brings into discussion the subjectivity of the... more

"Doing" Media Studies in the Global South

Organizer: Silpa Mukherjee

Over the past decade film and media studies have witnessed a substantial increase in published research into the production, circulation, and consumption of media in the Global South. Most often this... more

Working with Tainted Legacies

Organizer: Amanda Paxton

Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro this year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the longstanding sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather... more

TV-Philosophy

Organizer: Jeroen Gerrits

This seminar aims to explore TV-series at their intersection with philosophy. As a newer sibling to the sub-discipline of film-philosophy, TV-philosophy neither reduces television series to... more

Aesthetics and Politics of Necrofiction

Organizer: Ioana Pribiag

Aesthetics and Politics of Necrofiction Death is universal; its conditions are not. Nor are its connections to memory. As Judith Butler explains, for death to count, for it to register as a... more

Marginalized Voices: The Representation of Peripheral Life in Literature

Organizer: Carlo Stranges

The representation of lives on the outskirts of society has been a staple of twentieth and twenty-first century media. From the romantic antiheroes to oppressed communities, the representations of... more

The Poetics of Collecting

Organizer: Guangchen Chen

To collect and to narrate are two common human instincts. But they are often at odds with each other. On the one hand, we desire to tell a story out of a collection of things; or rather, a collection... more

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