2026 Faculty

The 16th IWL will meet at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from June 29 through July 23, 2026. The session is funded jointly by the Einstein-Stiftung Berlin and the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership. Our four-week program includes a total of twelve 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. Our participants will have the chance to examine critically the latest challenges of this comprehensive and rapidly developing field, from its theoretical concepts and the history of the discipline to its forms of practice today embedded in a world market.

In addition to attending seminars, our participants will give a paper or present a work in progress or a recent project within one of our nine colloquia 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, Sociology and World Literature, and Politics, Poetics and World Literature, and including as of this year the Balzan Colloquium. Meeting once each week with their peers under the leadership of one of our postdoc or faculty participants, they have the opportunity to share their work and receive valuable feedback from scholars all over the world working on similar topics, and develop new projects including future ACLA seminars.