Seminars

(in)filtration

Organizer: Yuji Kato

In traditional Gothic and romantic literature, the theme of infiltration takes on various forms such as sounds, voices, tremors, gas, and more. These elements highlight the interactions between the... more

Illegibility and Aesthetic Form in the African Diasporas of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans

Organizer: Semilore Sobande

This seminar invites submissions that explore intentional illegibilites deployed in literary and visual forms in the African diasporas of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Despite their... more

Digital Platforms and the Transformation of Marginalized Narratives: Resistance, Visibility, and Inclusion

Organizer: Linet Thomas

This panel will explore how various forms of marginalization are reclaiming autonomy and reshaping their subjective identities through digital platforms. The evolution of media has always been... more

Whiteness: Imploding the Impermeable and Invisible Monolith

Organizer: Niia Bishop

This seminar invites papers critically exploring whiteness as an invented political and social identity category. We seek to investigate its emergence from the transatlantic slave trade, its... more

Magical Realism as World Literature: Travelling Concept, Travelling Theory, Untranslatable

Organizer: Cesar Dominguez

In their 2020 The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century, Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier argue that the globalization of magical realism marks a new stage in the... more

Critical Whiteness and the Middle Ages: Past and Present

Organizer: Nahir I. Otaño Gracia

In the essay ‘Solidarity and the medieval invention of race’ Seeta Chaganti reminds us that Medievalists have access to archival and historical records, and we can examine these archives carefully in... more

Decolonisation and the Literary Field

Organizer: Michelle Kelly

From the current moment in which calls to decolonize literary studies prevail, we look back to the eras of political decolonization, and the changes they catalysed in literary cultures and... more

Bad Relations: Writing Out Misconceptions in the Literary Anglosphere

Organizer: Damian Maher

Over the past few decades, human beings have been pictured not so much as rational creatures, but as beings who exist primarily in relation to one another. This so-called 'Relational Turn' has taken... more

Rethinking (Im)materiality in Folk Religion and Popular Culture around the World

Organizer: Yuqian Yan

We have been rethinking the notions of “matter” and “material”. Speculative realists direct our attention to objects beyond human sensory perceptions. Vitalist materialists emphasize the... more

Time, Memory, and the Western

Organizer: Jordan Savage

Time and Memory in the Western "Wade: Mind telling me where we're going? Evans: No, I don't mind telling you. We're going to Contention City. We're going wait in a... more

Inventions of the Baroque

Organizer: Alex Verdolini

“The Baroque was seen as being restricted to one genre (architecture), or to an increasingly restrictive determination of periods and places, or yet again to a radical disavowal: the Baroque never... more

Comparative Caribbean Modernisms

Organizer: J. Dillon Brown

Scholars have frequently named the Caribbean as the crucible of what we now understand as the modern, such that if one understands modernism, in broad terms, as an aesthetic response to modernity,... more

Postcolonial Literature and Ecotheology

Organizer: George Handley

Secular criticism, as Edward Said defined it, has been central to the study of postcolonial literature. It is also clear, however, that traditionally secularist readings of postcolonial literature... more

Moving Past Lovecraft: New Visions of the Weird

Organizer: Alexander Sell

Academic discussions of weird fiction today are dominated by HP Lovecraft. This makes some sense, considering he promoted the term and is perhaps the name most associated with it. Yet, the weird... more

Rethinking the Comparative Studies on Asia-Latin America through Korea-Latin America

Organizer: JinAeng Choi

In recent years, there has been increased publications exploring transcultural movements and relations between Asia and Latin America. At the same time, the study of Korean popular culture,... more

The Relativity of Relativism and Objectivization on Normative Ground - Referring to Fundamental Rights, Private Law and Manifestations

Organizer: Jayshree Singh

The normative structures are subjective to external ways of manifesting the commensurable approach to moral relativistic psyche projecting that moral progress is the objective reality prevailing due... more

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