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Seminars

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

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

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

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

Disability, 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

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

Southern Literatures across Multiple Southscapes

Organizer: Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi

This seminar examines “southern literature” from a comparative perspective, examining how “the South” may be invoked and imagined at different locales.Taking Thadious M. Davis’s concept of “... more

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