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.

Ecology, Ecstasy, Mysticism

Organizer: Alexander Sorenson

How should Spring bring forth a garden on hard stone? Become earth, that you may grow flowers of many colors. —Rumi The soul is all things. She has being with the stones and growing with the trees... more

The Sentient Animal and the Author in Renaissance Humanism

Organizer: Hervé Goerger

The Renaissance marked a pivotal moment in the history of human-animal relations: as humanism emphasized the dignity, potential, and centrality of the human being, it also prompted a re-evaluation of... more

Decolonization and Unevenness in Material Contexts

Organizer: Auritro Majumder

Though a buzzword, “decolonization” is far from a settled matter. From a by-now-distant sequence of political independence to contemporaneous efforts to decolonize institutions, decolonization has... more

Novels, Narratives, and Narrators- A Comparative Approach

Organizer: Hanna Khan

This seminar invites 20-minute presentation papers on the topics of novels, narratives, and narrators for the 2025 American Comparative Literature Association’s virtual conference. Interpreting... more

The End of the Beginning: Post-Soul Humor

Organizer: Alex Valin

This panel invites researchers to consider how African American writers deploy humor within what critics have termed the “post-soul,” “post-Black,” “Black post-Blackness,” and “New Black Aesthetic”... more

Large Language Models and Literature

Organizer: Nina Begus

Writers, scholars, artists, and students are now using or negotiating novel AI writing tools, aiding in their development by their very use. What can be gained in this deluge of machine words?... more

World Literature and the Ottoman Institution of Slavery

Organizer: Arif Camoglu

This seminar aims to bring together critical reflections on literary representations, from across continents and centuries, of enslavement in the Ottoman Empire. It will spotlight the place of the... more

After Race, Six: New Alignments in Comparative Racialization, Multiracialism, and Post-Racialism

Organizer: Lynn Itagaki

Comparative racialization rests upon the mutually constitutive concept of race in which groups are racialized in relation to one another, managing and prioritizing racial claims on the state. Through... more

Apocalyptic Systems Thrillers, Today and Beyond

Organizer: Ian Butcher

In a March 29, 2024 New York Times article, the novelist and journalist Hari Kunzru suggested that the "apocalyptic systems thriller, or . . . A.S.T." has emerged out of the tumult of globalization... more

Rebooting World SF

Organizer: Gerry Canavan

In its journals and on its syllabi, the field of science fiction studies becomes ever more international in its scope – but significant challenges persist in the way the US academy approaches texts... more

Against Presentism: The Deep History of Our Discipline and Our Object of Study

Organizer: Delia Ungureanu

“History is, as it were, sacred, because it must be truthful,” Don Quixote reminds us, “and where there is truth there is God, because he is truth; and yet in spite of all this, there are those who... more

Imagology: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Comparative Literature

Organizer: Ehsan Ghabool

Imagology is one of the earliest fields of comparative literature, introduced from the beginning with the perspectives of François Villemain (1790-1870) in French theory. The central issue of... more

China and the World: A Comparative Media Perspective

Organizer: Andrew Emerson

Much of modern Chinese studies revolves around the question of China’s place in the world. The specific terms of the debate vary: Chinese literature “and/as” world literature, global “Asias,” notions... more

Speculating Speculative Fiction

Organizer: John Souza

The term “speculative fiction” was first popularized by Robert Heinlein, who refers to a “speculative science fiction story” as one that uses the tools of science fiction to create “a new framework... more

Untangling the Past: the Figure of the Detective in Postcolonial and Transnational Fiction

Organizer: Priscilla Charrat-Nelson

The genre of detective fiction is "formally diverse, flourishing in multiple cultures, and engaged with the production of knowledge and transformation of consciousness within and across societies" (... more

Body, Language

Organizer: Dominik Zechner

I am terrified your body could fall apart at any second – Car Seat Headrest Spinoza famously lamented that we do not even know what bodies can do. Our seminar rephrases this... more

Children's Periodicals and Their Readers: Methods and Comparative Approaches

Organizer: Titas Bose

This seminar sets out to examine the comparative possibilities of studying the “children’s periodical”. Given its unique ephemeral form and its inherent relationship with time (seriality of... more

Disability, and the Environment, and Colonialism

Organizer: Tatiana Konrad

This seminar examines the imbrications of disability and the environment in the formation of colonial ideology and in the process of colonization. It traces the emergence of eco-ableist discourses... more

Writing Gender Violence: Ethics, Challenges, Possibilities

Organizer: Ragini Chakraborty

This panel aims to discuss how literature engages with the topic of gender violence by adopting a transnational, dialogic, and relational approach. We are interested in exploring how literature... more

Traumatic Memory and Literature as Narrative Medicine

Organizer: Kate Rose

Fiction writing enables a more accurate portrayal of trauma than mimesis or memoir, due to literature’s ability to reshape language and frame discourse metaphorically. With the flourishing of trauma... more

ACLA