The Institute held its sixth summer school session from June 20 through July 14, 2016, at Harvard. Our four-week program included a total of fourteen two-week seminars taught by leading names in world literature today, together with outstanding guest lectures and the opportunity for participants to share their work in colloquia, as well as panels on publishing and the job market. The program was be supplemented by outings and cultural events to build community beyond the boundaries of the formal sessions.
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Our 2016 guest lecturer was Homi Bhabha (Harvard) and our plenary speakers included some of our seminar leaders: Paul Bandia (Concordia University), Margaret Cohen (Stanford), David Damrosch (Harvard), Mariano Siskind (Harvard), Rebecca Walkowitz (Rutgers University). Special panels composed of IWL faculty discussed professional issues of strategies for moving into the job market and for publishing.
In addition to attending seminars, our participants gave a paper within one of our eight colloquia groups organized around broad themes: World Literature and Production, World Literature and Circulation, World Literature and Translation, Postcolonialism and World Literature, World Cinema and World Literature, Premodern Literature and World Literature; Politics, Poetics and World Literature. Meeting once each week with their peers under the leadership of one of our postdoc or faculty participants, they had the opportunity to make their own contribution to the developing field of world literary studies.
Our participants’ work benefited from using the resources of the Harvard Library, the largest and most important university library in the world for humanists.
We organized casual outings including a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Harvard's Fogg Museum, and a day at Singing Beach.