Seminars

Translation and Autotheory

Organizer: Jan Steyn

While the long-established publishing convention of the translator’s note or afterword has asked translators to provide short critical reflections on their practice, there has been a boom over the... more

Genealogies of World Comparatism

Organizer: Anca Parvulescu

The journal published in Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg, starting in 1877, Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, is considered the first journal of Comparative Literature. It functioned as... more

Simone de Beauvoir and the Lesbian

Organizer: Ruth Thrush

In 2020, philosopher Paul B. Preciado publicly criticised Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir for her interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir’s newly discovered novel, The Inseparables, as a novel about... more

Rethinking Literature Beyond the Frame of the Citizen

Organizer: Alexandra Lossada

As more countries are shifting to right-wing governments and nation-first policies, global cooperation needed to address pressing and interrelated issues, such as climate change and refugee crises,... more

Reading the European Semi-Periphery: Narrative, Legacy, Collective Memory

Organizer: Raul Algarin Villalba

This seminar delves into the underexplored literary contributions from the European semi-periphery. It focuses on narrative fiction and literary non-fiction from the 1990s to the present and aims to... more

Looking Back, Looking Forward: New Ways of Writing Vietnam

Organizer: Marian Wolbers

This panel seminar seeks to open meaningful discussions about changing writing styles as expressed in Vietnamese literature and contemporary Vietnamese American (VA) literature. While early... more

Thinking in and Beyond (?) a Text: Derrida, De Man, and the Political

Organizer: Jonathan Luftig

The relation between Derrida and de Man has always been difficult to assess. De Man, as opposed to Derrida, was initially (before Allegories of Reading) described as contributing to a “New New... more

Contemporary Asian Spy Literature and Cinema

Organizer: Lily Li

This panel invites papers on contemporary Asian spy literature and cinema from the late 20th century to the present. The enigmatic and dangerous espionage world in literature and cinema is always... more

Border Narratives, Border Aesthetics

Organizer: Evren Özselçuk

In the last two decades dominant approaches that view the border mainly as a marginal geopolitical site of exclusion have been seriously challenged both by migrants’ practices and by scholarly... more

Comparative Approaches to Prison Abolition: Reading & Representing Against Carcerality

Organizer: Michael Reyes Salas

In his essay “To Be Baptized” (1972), James Baldwin questions how the law serves to reinforce racial inequality: “if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not... more

Black Genres of Political Theology

Organizer: Andrew Santana Kaplan

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure, the... more

Fixing Responsibility?: Perpetrator Studies, Framing and Literary Witnessing

Organizer: Inayat Ullah

The recent shift of focus from ‘Victim’ to ‘Perpetrator’ and ‘Implicated Subject’ (Rothberg, 2019) has brought forth newer debates vis-a-vis cultural imaginary and the field of Countering Violent... more

Displacement, Identity, and Colonial Legacies: Literary works and Global Refugee Crises.

Organizer: Peter Ogunniran

Displacement, Identity, and Colonial Legacies: Literary works and Global Refugee Crises. According to the United Nations over 110 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to... more

Utopian Substances in and Beyond the Soviet Empire

Organizer: George Kovalenko

The utopian imagination that accompanied the Bolshevik revolution and the early years of Soviet rule sought to substantially transform not only ideas and relations between people, but the very... more

Toward a New Cultural Materialism

Organizer: Xuesong Shao

This seminar investigates material conditions and contradictions in and as cultural processes. In the mid-twentieth century, Raymond Williams argued for understanding culture as a process that... more

Comparative Indenture

Organizer: Rebecca Liu

This seminar draws on the global history of Asian indentured labor to explore the theory and method of “comparative indenture.” Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, European... more

Present When I'm Absent, Speaking When I'm Not There (Uh): The Surd and Immanent Expression in the Radical Black Aesthetic

Organizer: Zach Wagner

The Latin word, ‘Surdus’–used to translate the Arabic mathematical term, ‘asamm’–had referred to irrational numbers, those resisting, or willfully remaining deaf to, ratiocination and thus... more

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