A generous award from the Balzan Foundation is giving IWL the opportunity to bring a group of participants from five regions not yet well represented among our affiliates: Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and South/Southeast Asia. Each year for the next five years, this funding will provide all expenses, plus a stipend, for approximately ten participants to participate in the session overall and to form the year’s Balzan Colloquium. Each year this colloquium will be devoted to a specific topic, which in 2024 will be “Multilingualisms.” Its members will meet weekly...Read more about Balzan Colloquium: 10 fully-funded places at IWL in 2024
The 2022 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded for the first time to a French female author: Annie Ernaux. Since her first novel, Les Armoires vides (1974 / Cleaned Out 1990), Annie Ernaux has explored forms of symbolic violence that are experienced in daily life, first through fiction (in her first three autobiographical novels), then through what she has called “autosociobiography”. As a secondary school teacher from a modest family of grocers, Ernaux read Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction...
The 13th IWL returns to its headquarters at Harvard from July 5 through July 27, 2023. We've assembled a great group that includes Homi Bhabha (Harvard), David Damrosch (Harvard),...
David Damrosch's Around the World in 80 Books that saw us through the pandemic last year in blog form has now turned into a book published by Penguin (USA) and Pelican (UK). Below you can find a glowing review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian and the link where you can order it.
Lizy Mostowski (ABD Comparative Literature current student): “The Institute for World Literature was a rewarding experience that not only exposed me to new texts and modes of analyses helpful to my area of study; participation in the Institute also allowed me to network with professors and graduate students from around the world that I wouldn't have otherwise met. Though the program was virtual the year that I participated, I found that it was a wonderful mix of seminars, talks, and colloquia that allowed me to learn about the general field of World Literature from...
Want to know all about the 2020 IWL summer session? Check out the reports by Sarah Agath and Sandra Tausel, two grad students from the University of Innsbruck who participated in our 10th IWL summer session. You can download their reports here:
From May 11 through August 31, Covid-sequestered lovers of literature can join Harvard’s David Damrosch in a world journey through world literature, five books per week for sixteen weeks. He’ll be exploring the ways in which literature enters the world, and the world enters literature, taking up a set of works each week associated with a memorable locale. The project’s website features a blog on each day’s book, together with ideas and resources for further reading. Join the journey at: