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Seminars

Anyone who would like to organize a seminar for our 2025 Annual Meeting (held virtually, May 29 - June 1, 2025) must first post a call for papers here. Calls for papers will be accepted through September 9, 2024.

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

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

Locating Bhabha in Postcolonial Studies

Organizer: Nisarg P.

The year 2024 will mark a thirty-year anniversary of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture [LoC], first published as a gathering of essays, primarily written between 1983 and 1991, and published as a... more

Late Stages

Organizer: Abigail RayAlexander

What are the symptoms of being late-stage? What do we reflect upon, appreciate, fear, endeavor to do, and look forward to during such times? One arena of late stages involves political and social... 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

The Beauty of Palm: Greek Technē in the digital era

Organizer: Vivien Jiaqian Zhu

How to approach the Greek notion of technē in the digital era? What are various means to make the reception of technē expressive, accessible, and durable? To what extent does the paradox of science... more

Farming and Fiction

Organizer: Ayşe Çelikkol

Amidst renewed attention to crop and animal husbandry in the public sphere, this panel seeks to advance our understanding of the connection between farming and fiction. Relations among humans, other... more

Literary Genres in the Age of Convergence

Organizer: Francesca Medaglia

Throughout history, literary genres have served various functions, from a simple classificatory role to a more normative one, depending on the context and era. The discussion of genres began with... 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

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

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