Seminars

(Be)longing; nostalgia and the construction of ideology

Organizer: Hannah Link

In How Societies Remember (1989), Paul Connerton writes that the present “distort[s]” the past, and vice-versa, in our collective memory” (2). These distortions can be instrumentalised by politicians... more

(Un)Easy Entanglements: Agency, Alliances, and Affinities of Translators and Language Teachers

Organizer: Shane Carreon

Situated at the locus of power relations in and through language, translators and language teachers are entwined by and within complex ideologies, epistemologies, and governing policies. In... more

The Person in Law & Culture

Organizer: Jeannine DeLombard

The person is one of Western culture’s most enduring legal and literary forms. According to the origin story recounted by everyone from Thomas Hobbes to Hannah Arendt to Roberto Esposito, the Latin... more

World Literature and Disappearance

Organizer: Joseph Wager

Enforced disappearance has become a lingua franca of transitional-justice processes around the world. Reflecting the experiences of Latin American dictatorships, this crime is defined by arbitrary... more

Cultures of Energy Transition

Organizer: Martin Premoli

“Energy transition isn’t a choice. It’s not a matter of whether we transition or not — there’s no ‘if’ involved. We will have to transition. The question is whether we are able to successfully do so... more

Photographic Practices of Repair

Organizer: Candela Marini

Photography's complicity in the destruction of diverse worlds has become a central concern for scholars, artists, and activists engaged in the dismantling of imperial ways of thinking, while also... more

Public Environmental Humanities

Organizer: Yanoula Athanassakis

Public *Environmental* Humanities This seminar invites proposals on public scholarship and engagement originating from – or related to – the environmental humanities. The desire to be in... more

Arabic Literature, or The Ancient in the Modern

Organizer: Kevin Blankinship

“It would appear,” wrote Syrian poet Adunis in his Introduction to Arab Poetics, “that the return to the ancient has been more eagerly pursued whenever the internal conflict has intensified, or the... more

Picturing Violence in the Age of Annihilation

Organizer: Elizabeth Liendo

Violence—and the challenge it presents to representation—is a black hole at the heart of narrative. Textual, film, news media, and artistic narratives all must confront the question of how to... more

Disciplinary Affects: The Aesthetics of Systemic Injustices

Organizer: Esther Edelmann

This seminar examines how institutional practices of exclusion and marginalization shape cultural perceptions of the outcast and outlaw, appealing primarily to emotional responses rather than... more

“They Called Me a Lioness”: Palestinian Girls Fight for Visibility and Freedom in Palestinian-American Muslimah Literature

Organizer: Hasnul Djohar

Arguably, although Edward Said’s Orientalism was published almost five decades ago, Muslimah or Muslim women have remained unseen and invisible in contemporary Anglo-American society. To question... more

What Is This “Black” in Global Black Literatures?

Organizer: Raquel Kennon

Following Stuart Hall’s provocation in his classic 1992 essay, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” this panel begins with its own “conjectural” moment as it seeks to explore “Global... more

Slow Violence in Vulgar Ground: Happenings in the Life of a Blind Girl

Organizer: Hao Sun

This paper examines the concept of slow violence as depicted in a Malaysian Chinese writer Li Zishu's novel "Vulgar Ground" (流俗地). The novel, set in Malaysia from 1969 to 2018, tells the story... more

Oceanic Humanities

Organizer: Sarah Senk

As traditional disciplines face questions of relevance and survival in an increasingly STEM-dominated academic landscape, Oceanic Humanities offers a new framework for understanding human experience... more

Alternatives to Narrative

Organizer: Nina Farizova

There is a growing awareness among Anglophone humanists that narrative as a meaning-making mode has been overemphasized. Having migrated from the study of the verbal arts into history, law, medicine... more

Representations of Addiction in U.S. Media: Discourses, Commodities, and Cultural Meanings

Organizer: Fernando Esquivel-Suarez

This seminar invites scholars to explore the complex and often contentious representations of addiction in U.S. media through a cultural studies lens, while critically questioning the... more

Politics and Desire in the Archive

Organizer: Mercedes Trigos

This seminar invites papers that consider the methodologies of archival work and their potential connections to scholars’ fantasies of meaning, coherence, completion, and relevance. Archival... more

Revolt or Reinvention?: Citizenship in the Contemporary Literary Imagination

Organizer: Daniel Bergman

Is it time to stop fantasizing about citizenship? In a provocative 2022 essay, the political theorist Linda Bosniak answers in the affirmative: if the twenty-first century has been primarily defined... more

Migration, Speech and Literary Form

Organizer: Andrew Koenig

This panel takes as its jumping off point the centrality of unconventional speech in modernism, and the ways that speech is informed by migration. What forms of articulation become available at the... more

Toxic Exposure: Chemicals in Contemporary Global Fiction

Organizer: Alexandra Brown

Agrochemical use has long been a foundational tool to insulate plants against disease and improve yields in global agriculture, yet the 20th century brought with it a slew of changes to farming... more

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