# (Ne)MLA, ACLA & more September 02, 2024 - [ News ](/news-categories/news) ###### [**MLA** ]() **Modern Language Association Annual Convention** [**Women and Emancipatory Narratives Across Media**](https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/Paper33868.html) This in-person panel invites 250-word abstracts that examine women’s narratives, representations, and forms of agency within resistance movements across film and digital platforms. **Deadline for submissions:** Friday, March 27, 2026 Atousa Kaviani, Binghamton U, State U of New York ([akaviani@binghamton.edu ](mailto:akaviani@binghamton.edu)) **Writing within Catastrophe:** ***Weiji*****, Risk, and the Futures of East Asian and Comparative Literature** Drawing on the conceptual ambiguity of *weiji* (risk and opportunity), which simultaneously denotes both crisis and contingency, this session asks how East Asian and comparative literature respond to a world in which catastrophe is ongoing rather than resolved. In the early twenty-first century, economic decline, environmental disasters, pandemic aftermaths, geopolitical instability, and migration crises have made uncertainty and risk part of everyday life across East Asia and its global diasporas. Under these conditions, border crossings, such as geographic, linguistic, medial, or epistemic, have become the norm rather than an anomaly, routine rather than emergency, and risk management has become a habitual, ceaseless cultural practice. *This panel asks how literary writing and theory in East Asian contexts move beyond paradigms of trauma, testimony, and immediate crisis response toward new modes of conceptualization oriented toward contingency, futurity, and ethical recalibration.* If catastrophe is no longer an endpoint but a sustained environment and everyday occurance, what new literary forms, interpretive frameworks, and theoretical vocabularies emerge from within it? Where do opportunities arise amid prolonged instability? We welcome papers exploring a wide range of East Asian and comparative viewpoints, including, but not limited to, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Sinophone, and diasporic literatures, as well as transregional and global frameworks. Possible areas of inquiry include (but are not limited to): - Literary and theoretical responses to pandemic aftermaths, environmental crisis, and geopolitical risk in East Asia; - The impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on authorship, interpretation, and literary theory; - Innovative methodologies in digital humanities and comparative analysis; - New approaches to historical conceptualization under conditions of permanent crisis; - Shifting literary functions in relation to ecology, migration, media saturation, and global inequality; - Innovative responses to the inexorability of climate change; - Emerging ethical turns in East Asian and comparative literature, shaped by risk, contingency, and futurity. This session frames catastrophe not as a resolved event but as a generative condition that reshapes how literature in and about East Asia thinks, theorizes, and intervenes in the world. By bringing together scholars from East Asian studies, comparative literature, media studies, the environmental humanities, and critical theory, this session aims to reflect collectively on the risks and possibilities shaping the field’s future at this critical ethical and epistemic crossroads. Send proposals of approximately 300-words (title and abstract) and 250-word bios to Christopher Lupke <> by Friday, March 20th. ## Journal CfP [**Literary History — Journal of Literary Studies**](https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__knjizevnaistorija.rs_index.php_home_index&d=DwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=OOsfXaIMTkeiZHPlI1rffgQJwhTRJtaCn3eelPZ9Wdk&m=hqRmCbO4wcapNfo3ID8eUtY_QXbCxfCN4HCGo4O4H9w-Ys2Zr3lF7GW7ImBU0yuR&s=049DLJcu-gZffYRCE9zvX8IM_P4K4WkDm1SXa2U0Aiw&e=) This issue invites papers focused on **literary studies, migrations and exile, especially in relation to Serbian and Slavic literatures.** Theoretical articles, dealing with new applications of traditional methodologies or new methodological approaches in literary studies, are also welcome. The deadline for submitting papers for this year's issue is **December 1st, 2025**. Detailed author instructions can be found here: [Information For Authors | Literary History — Journal of Literary Studies](https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__knjizevnaistorija.rs_index.php_home_information_authors&d=DwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=OOsfXaIMTkeiZHPlI1rffgQJwhTRJtaCn3eelPZ9Wdk&m=hqRmCbO4wcapNfo3ID8eUtY_QXbCxfCN4HCGo4O4H9w-Ys2Zr3lF7GW7ImBU0yuR&s=AAwthZ4DYjHrULcgQre-46oSYLia690zsL8s1yIfZ-U&e=) Below is an overview of the journal's profile and indexing. **1. Scope** As one of the leading scientific journals in Serbia, ***Literary History*** **\[*****Књижевна историја*****\]** publishes outstanding scientific results and innovative interdisciplinary research. **2. Language, script, and the general format of the manuscript:** The papers can be published in Serbian (Ekavian or Ijekavian, in the Cyrillic script) i.e. in Croatian or Bosnian, as well as English, German, French or Russian. Accepted text length is 30000 to 60000 characters (with spaces). **3. Indexing** *Literary History* \[*Књижевна историја*\] is an **Open Access Journal** and is indexed in **ERIH PLUS**. **CEEOL,** **MLA,** and **Italian Anvur** (Literary Criticism, Comparative Literature and Slavistics) as an "A class" journal. The International Committee of Slavists categorized *Literary History* \[*Књижевна историја*\] as a journal of the first category on its **Reference List of Slavic Journals**. **4. Archival systems** *Literary History* \[*Књижевна историја*\] journal is included in **LOCKSS** and **CLOCKSS** archival systems. *Literary History* has been preserved in doiFil - Repository of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) since 2019. Issued by Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade and in the Digital repository of the National Library of Serbia. The papers of this journal are also archived in the Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ. ## **ACLA CfP** ***Nota bene!*** **A****cceptance of the ACLA seminars below isn't guaranteed. The ACLA committee will notify seminar organizers of its decision by 2 December.** ### [Autofiction’s Deceptions: Jewish Self-Writing]() **Organizers: Ella Elbaz & Shiri Shapira** Paul De Man famously argues that an autobiography is a mask that distorts the face it covers; this seminar wishes to discuss the flip side of that coin: fiction that masquerades as autobiography—which is one possible definition of autofiction. The only consensus autofiction invokes is that its definition is disputed (Mortimer 2009), as a genre, a mode of writing (Ferreira-Myers 2018) or reading (Effe & Gibbons 2022), or as a strategy to cope with the instability of truth, memory, and identity in contemporary culture. Hailed as the genre that encapsulates our cultural moment—be it the post-Truth or the Selfie era—autofiction poses a challenge to literary critics: do we need to revise the generic and narratological terms with which we analyze autofiction's system of referentiality? Is there anything new about autofiction—or is it a modification of known genres such as memoirs, autobiographies, or even historical fiction? More broadly, does the inflation of autofiction have anything to do with the crisis of readership we witness in the past couple of decades? Could it be that literature becomes increasingly self-reflexive—perhaps self-obsessed—as it becomes irrelevant? Autofiction is a global phenomenon with particular manifestations and reception in various contexts. The term first appeared in Serge Doubrovsky’s work, one that is deeply informed by Jewish trauma (Boulé 2009). We propose to intersect the transnational system of autofiction with another global literary system: Jewish literature. Written in English, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish (and more), and with long standing traditions of grappling with self-reflexivity, intertextuality, identity, diasporic/minoritarian as well as hegemonic and settler-colonial positions, we propose Jewish literature as one possible arena to explore autofiction's deceptions. We would like to respond to the idea that Jewish identity is produced through texts and their reading rather than take a coherent notion of Jewishness for granted (Schreier 2015). Can we identify specific characteristics of Jewish autofiction? If so, how do these negotiate contemporary tensions of Jewish identity? How does contemporary autofiction of Jewish writers correspond with past iterations of Jewish self-writing? Papers may relate to the rise of autofiction in the digital age, the allowance it grants younger writers to access autobiography, its expression of authorial anxieties prevalent among white, male authors vs. the participation of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community in writing autofiction. Papers exploring the terms in narratology and genre theory that autofiction intentionally blurs, as well as studies of cases that redefine the borders between fact and fiction are also welcome. We also invite papers that study the history of autofiction in Jewish literature as well as contemporary examples of Jewish autofiction. ### [**Comparative Archives and the Global Unrest**](https://www.acla.org/seminar/7d45fc38-c04e-4bd4-81bd-cec7c81f34d2) **Organizer:** **Suddhadeep Mukherjee** The archival turn has been pluralized and deferred continually in the last decade, engendering in turn a continual reimagination of not just the signifier “archive” but also of the approaches to it. Such reimaginations intervene and interrupt the disciplinary definitions of Comparative Literature, driving it to envision and invite newer frameworks, fueling the discipline’s core essence. The seminar attempts to argue that the radical capacities of the discipline stretch the limits of the archive and expand the subsequent approaches to it, and in so doing resist its own definitional restraints. Especially at the present moment of global unrest, when both the being of the archive and the access to it are under serious genocidal threats, the seminar asks how the comparative practice can model pathways of archival reparation, if not absolute recuperation. Alongside the inquiry of the primary concepts of archive and comparative literature, interest will be invested in un/learning the ethics and politics involved in approaching these concepts. Scholars engaged with archival theory across disciplines have proposed a shift towards embracing unverifiability over the verifiable, fiction over fact, disarray over neat documentation. The panels in the seminar asks if this vital skepticism evolving in archival theory towards the notion of “evidence” be generatively put in conversation with the disciplinary model of comparative literature that has, since its inception, been solely defined by such skepticism, be it in relation to the idea of a “text” or what qualifies as the “literary.” Simultaneously, the seminar aspires to imagine if the methodological eccentricities of comparative literature, that strategically refute binaries and boundaries, can allow archival theory and the archives to proliferate and expand in the imagined elsewhere. The seminar looks for papers that interrogate, but are not limited to, the following: - How archives survive through interactions with other archives, and therefore what “other archives” stand for today? - How to enter and exit an archive, and in the case of restricted entry, ways to approach (and/or “strike against”) the archive? - If archives represent fiction, how might we conceptualize fiction today and vice-versa? - Ways of negotiating with the institutionalization and institutionality of archives. - Different registers of the archive—textual, visual, sonic, ephemeral, etc.—and their relationality with the idea of comparative literature. - How might the overwhelming presence of AI as an all-encompassing archive be countered? - The ubiquity of archives and of comparative literature. - Archive, Affect, and Comparative Literature**zer: Suddhadeep Mukherjee** ### [Control, Communication, Cosmos: Systems Thinking and Practices in Asia and Beyond](https://www.acla.org/seminar/7003c92a-c683-495a-a5a7-368051a00ae1) **Organizers: Zichuan Gan & Rodica-Livia Monnet** Systems are everywhere: as concepts, practices, and lifeways, they have sparked extensive theoretical debates and permeated creative work across multiple fields. Originating in the field of biology, systems theory was a mode of thought that incorporated many important mid-20th-century methods (cybernetics, information theory, scientific management) and evolved into social sciences and governance theories. For instance, sociologist Niklas Luhmann redefined autopoietic systems by extending the concept beyond biology to self-reproducing social mechanisms. The conceptual framework of the system has also permeated contemporary thought. Though not always named as such, Gilles Deleuze, for example, argues that Foucauldian disciplinary societies are giving way to control societies, governed by flexible, dynamic, and continuously modulating systems. In our contemporary moment, the persistence of systemic crises such as climate change, political extremism, and military conflicts may also be read as symptomatic of a broader failure of systems. In Asia, systems theory—despite its Western roots—intersects with local particularities, such as the influence of systems thinking on China’s One-Child Policy, the establishment of biometric systems in India, and Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. The region’s rapid, uneven development also presents unique challenges and opportunities to rethink systems theory beyond Western paradigms. As Kuan-Hsing Chen argues in *Asia as Method*, shifting analytical attention to intra-Asian cultural and historical exchanges could allow for a more situated understanding of systemic thought. This seminar explores how systems theories, practices, and aesthetics have been transmitted, transformed, and contested across Asia. We invite diverse interpretations of “system” and welcome comparative approaches that connect Asia with other regions, such as Eastern Europe and Latin America. Papers may engage with literary, cinematic, linguistic, sociological, philosophical, technological, religious, and other cultural or historical perspectives on the following themes (among others): - How do Asian contexts—such as post-WWII infrastructure projects—produce alternatives to Eurocentric systems theory from premodern to contemporary times? - In what ways are systems operationalized in Asia, particularly through digital technologies? For example, how do social media platforms and AI algorithms construct “data identities”? - How do artistic and cultural works represent, critique, or reimagine systems thinking? For instance, to what extent do science fiction thought experiments expose or reconfigure systemic logics? - How do system-oriented practices shape affective engagement in society, culture, and technology? For example, how does sound act as a systemic interface that governs affect? - What new insights emerge when we reconceptualize “systems” as culturally and historically shaped imaginaries of knowledge, power, and interconnection? ### [**Exophony: Writing Beyond Linguistic Inheritance**](https://www.acla.org/seminar/d72f28a6-b19f-4cd9-bf19-2817b59bad4f) **Organizers: Benedetta Cutolo & Anna Bourges Celaries** This seminar explores the concept of exophony— the choice of writing in a language other than those inherited through one’s background (whether by colonial history, family ties, or intimate relations)—as a practice of aesthetic, political, and epistemological dislocation. While often associated with translingualism or multilingualism, exophony demands its own theoretical framework: one that accounts for the affective, historical, and ethical stakes of writing from outside the languages inscribed in one’s personal or collective history.Moreover, the notion of « choice » is what sets exophony aside from similar, yet different, literary practices as exophonic writers do pick their new writing language. Following the literary and theoretical works of Jhumpa Lahiri, Yoko Tawada, and other practitioners of intentional linguistic estrangement, this panel aims to define and complicate the notion of exophony through literary, philosophical, and translational lenses. In an era shaped by forced migration, cultural hybridization, and algorithmic mediation, what does it mean to choose to write—and to read—from outside? We invite papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics: - **Defining Exophony:** How can we conceptualize exophony as distinct from multilingualism and translingualism? What does it mean to write *exophonically* rather than simply in multiple languages? - **The Ethics and Affects of Exophonic Writing:** How does exophony intersect with questions of identity, trauma, nostalgia, or reinvention? What are the psychological and ethical implications of abandoning or resisting the “mother tongue”? - **Exophony and Literary Form:** Does writing in a non-native language influence narrative structure, syntax, or poetic rhythm? Can exophony be read formally, beyond authorial biography? - **Exophony and Translation:** How does exophonic writing challenge or reframe dominant models of translation? Is the exophonic writer always already self-translating—or resisting translation? - **Exophony as Political Strategy:** What are the ideological and geopolitical implications of linguistic choice? How does exophony function in postcolonial, diasporic, or decolonial contexts? - **AI, Language, and the Posthuman Voice:** How do AI-powered translation tools and generative language models reshape the terrain of exophonic writing? Can artificial intelligence be said to produce a form of exophony—*a voice from outside* the human? - **Writing in Exile, Writing in Transit:** How does exophony intersect with displacement, statelessness, and linguistic exile? What kinds of temporal or spatial liminality emerge in exophonic texts? We welcome proposals from scholars working in comparative literature, translation studies, philosophy of language, digital humanities, and related fields. ### [Genre and Landscape in Global Comparison](https://www.acla.org/seminar/25f249cf-6419-4412-bcd3-3742fed56641) **Organizers: Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson & Mingrui Wen** This panel seeks to arrange a comparative conversation about the relationship between genre and landscape from the twentieth century to present. However they are to be understood, genres are highly portable and long have been refashioned across linguistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries. Landscapes, however, appear in most critical accounts as deeply located. Whether in the spatial turn, for regionalist writers and filmmakers, or in more recent environmental media and ecocritical paradigms, landscapes can be remade and destroyed, connected or isolated, are (as W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us) techniques of power or components of identity—but remain intractably *somewhere*. To think about genre in a particular landscape is to ask fundamental questions about the mediation of experience by place. As a scene of reading or as setting, how does landscape condition or delimit genre? How do familiar questions of commensurability, of genre’s adaptation or remaking in new contexts, rely on or presuppose similarities between landscapes as integral to basic subsistence and cultural life? As thrown into relief by genre, in what ways does landscape sustain or exceed the ways of world-making (whether as a world-system, the stages of a supply chain, national borders, or geography)? And what does reading for landscape reveal about the history of the many portable genres of globalization? Beyond thinking across a broad range of linguistic contexts, we are particularly interested in works from or within landscapes, such as the rural, semi-rural, ocean, pastoral, or any number of biome and water table demarcated regional places. This helps to problematize or move beyond the urban-centered assessment of genre under globalization, which too easily elides many places in the world into a structural position or zone in a world-system, usually through the avatar of their regional centers. We do not discount or ignore the urban, but seek to reframe it within the broader landscape which supports it and which is often mobilized as setting, set, or regional identity on the pages and screens of urban life. To begin with the landscape is to emphasize a history of globalization as seen from the rural and the provincial. To think genre from landscape is also an invitation to consider how the natural world is at work in these histories of aesthetic conventions and changes as much as it is an invitation to examine how it has remained uninterrogated. We hope to entertain some of the following or related questions: - Class, nation, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality: what do we need to consider to understand the relationship between genre and landscape? Seascape? - (How) does genre help us distinguish landscape from a cluster of related terms like environment, place, location, or territory? How do these distinctions shift with region, history, etc.? - (How) do these questions change between literature and film? - What new cross-landscape histories might emerge from such an approach? ### [Historicizing and Reframing Media Dispositives](https://www.acla.org/seminar/4016186b-6666-4c0c-8a91-2aa067d85999) **Organizers: Dominique Jullien & Peter Bloom** The term *dispositif* has been widely adapted in relation to assemblage and system as part of aesthetic, political, and social theories of power. It has also been used to refer to devices and processes of internal and external image production. In film and media studies, *dispositif* applies to objects that function both as material devices, and within discursive contexts. Shifting away from its original emphasis on power/knowledge, we consider three epistemological polarities generated by the concept of *dispositif*. How can new approaches to *dispositives* be brought to bear on particular objects, e.g. devices of mediation, or ritual objects, involving their appropriation into self-reflective discourses of introspection? 1\) Inner/outer. Mediation devices, ubiquitous in 19th-century culture, straddle the fields of science, technology, entertainment, and literature. Because these make viewers see the invisible or the impossible, they become endlessly serviceable as tropes for mental processes. In similar fashion, ritual objects from non-Western cultures are appropriated as self-reflective and introspective tropes, intersecting ethnography with autobiography, as in Michel Leiris's writings. 2\) Archaic/modern. Modern technologies consistently overlay ancient mental formations. The convergence of archaic topoi with new technologies has attracted active media and literary scholarship in recent decades. The philosophical debates around artifacts collected during the colonial era express foundational anxieties about the persistence of magical thinking within cultures of modernity and secular modes of thinking. 3\) Singularity/universality. Optical technologies tend to hybridize as well as move between science and entertainment. As Kember and Plunkett (2025) note, they borrow from each other in a “dense and tangled mixed media landscape.” In an analogous manner, severing ritual objects from their original context and repositioning them in a new relational system of viewing, experiencing, and representation, leads to a shift away from the culturally singular towards a universalizing form of symbolism. We invite presenters to focus on one specific object or device, analyzing both its material uses and discursive properties, pairing objects with texts. Possible themes include: - Optical mediation devices (magic lanterns, kaleidoscopes, microscopes, telescopes...) as both scientific instruments, toys, and tropes for introspective practices - Power figures set in new networks of viewing practices (artist’s collections, anthropological museum, photography) and discursive contexts (introspection, self-construction) - The convergence and “intermedial reciprocity” (Groth 2012) between viewing and reading facilitated by new forms of mediated viewing - Medium and media: the convergence of spiritual practices (and/or magical thinking in general) and new media technologies. ### [Korea, East Asia, and the Cold War Politics of Comparison](https://www.acla.org/seminar/8d217af9-0c56-49e4-a3b5-648577884efa) **Organizers: HeeJin Lee & Chris Hanscom** This seminar proposes to examine how comparative literature and area studies have delimited possibilities for reading non-Western literatures by considering how Korean literature has been compared to other literatures in and from East Asia. Together, these literatures allow for reflections on the remarkable continuity of the exclusionary logic of comparison subtending these fields of knowledge, a logic that tends to reduce non-Western literatures to the status of evidentiary documents that supposedly reflect a reality about peoples and places that unfailingly agrees with what is already known. In response to criticism of the continued presence of this logic in comparative literature and Asian studies, some have proposed introducing more East Asian literatures into comparison, expanding the quantity and scope of literary comparisons at large. We contend that these approaches fall short of challenging the problematic logic that remains at work in comparing literatures across fields, as they overlook the imbrication of colonialism and the Cold War at the heart of comparative literature and Asian studies. Many have already reflected on the colonial tendencies and Cold War origins of both fields. Yet locating the colonial in the Cold War in the context of East Asia requires the recognition not only of colonial power (typically "the West") that forces agreement with a prescribed "what is known," but also of the particular history of modern empire in the region—the distinctive experience of some polities, like Korea, of having been colonized by Japan, a fellow non-Western polity and geographic neighbor. And although the Cold War began with the end of Japanese colonial rule in East Asia, it carried forth a logic of comparison stemming from colonial power, Western and otherwise. To better understand how Korean and other East Asian literatures evince this continuity of the colonial in and beyond the Cold War, we seek to engage with seminar papers that ask: - How does the Cold War continue to influence the way that Korean and other East Asian literatures are considered in literary comparisons as non-Western literatures? - How do comparisons of diverse colonial contexts enable insights about the continuity of the colonial logic into the Cold War and its fields of knowledge? - How do (re)considerations of Korean and other East Asian literatures allow us to think beyond the exclusionary logic of comparison from the Cold War, built on "selective remembering" of the colonial past? We welcome papers that, in answering these questions: make evident shortcomings of contemporary approaches to East Asian literatures as non-Western literatures in both comparative literature and Asian studies; theorize the act of comparison through East Asian literary texts and their reception; and/or propose new modes of comparison. ### [Linguistic Nationalisms: Far-Right Politics and Global South Epistemologies](https://www.acla.org/seminar/6a5d2eaa-5a2f-409e-b0e7-034c0278ef67) **Organizer: Rudrani Gangopadhyay** Across the Global South, language remains a key site where power is enacted, identities are negotiated, and resistance is articulated. From colonial histories to the present resurgence of far-right politics, linguistic hierarchies have been mobilized to enforce cultural homogeneity, erase minority voices, and consolidate nationalist ideologies. This seminar invites papers that examine how literary, cinematic, and cultural texts respond to these dynamics, and how they generate alternative imaginaries of language—as hybridity, as resistance, and as world-making practice. The weaponization of language is not merely a relic of colonial history but a pressing reality today. In contexts such as recent conflicts over the status of Bengali in India, far-right movements seek to subsume regional languages under monolingual nationalist agendas, provoking cultural mobilizations and raising alarms about authoritarian control. Similar struggles over language, translation, and identity reverberate worldwide, from debates about Indigenous languages in Latin America to script politics in North Africa and the marginalization of creole languages in the Caribbean. In this context, we must ask ourselves the following question: • How do cultural texts confront policies of linguistic homogenization enforced by nationalist regimes? • What new comparative insights emerge when we link these struggles across different geographies and histories? • How might Global South perspectives on linguistic politics challenge the Eurocentric foundations of Comparative Literature itself? With these in mind, we welcome papers for this seminar which include but are not limited to the following topics: • Minor languages and literary resistance under far-right or authoritarian contexts • Translation as a site of power, mediation, and counter-discourse • Script and orthography as terrains of ideological struggle • Digital media and the algorithmic amplification or subversion of linguistic nationalism • Creole and hybrid languages as anti-hegemonic cultural formations • Poetics of multilingualism, code-switching, and minoritized speech in literature • Comparative case studies that bring multiple Global South geographies into dialogue By centering language politics within Global South contexts, this seminar also intervenes in the ongoing decolonial turn in Comparative Literature. It invites participants to rethink the discipline’s historical hierarchies of language and to imagine comparative practices grounded in multipolar, decolonial epistemologies. The seminar will foster sustained dialogue on how language, as both an instrument of oppression and a medium of resistance, reshapes our understanding of literature, politics, and comparison itself. ### [Literary Translation and its Institutions](https://www.acla.org/seminar/b7183975-6ad8-40b3-ae53-97c4158999fa) **Organizers: Anna Muenchrath & Matthew Eatough** US literary studies has seen an increased interest in the actors and institutions that shape our literary markets and canons. Most recently, scholars like Richard Jean So (2020), Laura McGrath (2021), Dan Sinykin (2023), and Alexander Manshel (2024) have shown how specific publishers, literary agents, 20th-century conglomeration, and prize and school culture impact what gets published, circulated, and consecrated in the US marketplace. But translations, which famously make up only 3% of the US’s publishing output, don’t always travel through the same institutions. Translators, book fairs, literary NGOs, national cultural institutes, and international copyright law, for example, play a much larger role in the global circulation of literature in translation. Yet because of their restricted role in US publishing, these institutions often receive less attention in US literary studies than they do in tangential fields like world literature studies or translation studies. This seminar takes a granular approach to translation publishing by mapping and historicizing the institutions that have impacted the field. Following the work of Sarah Brouillette (2019), who traces the influence of UNESCO’s literary programming, and Giséle Sapiro (2023), who investigates the role of the Nobel Prize in influencing translation trends, this seminar uses the scale of the institution to probe the values, politics, and capital that are exchanged when publishing literature-in-translation. How do institutions navigate the specific risks involved in publishing translations? What does attention to institutions help us to say about the translated texts themselves? And what scales and methods allow us to think both literature and literary institutions at once? Possible types of submission include, but are not limited to: - The tracing of the routes of specific works-in-translation through institutions - Histories of translating institutions, including but not limited to literary magazines, small presses, conglomerate translation publishing, online and self-publishing, etc. - Work that places US institutions into dialogue with translation institutions in other English-speaking countries (Canada, Ireland, UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, etc.) - Computational approaches to institutional data - Analyses of the marketing of translations (BookTok, BookTube, legacy media, etc.) - Materialist accounts of the production, distribution, and financing of literature-in-translation - Mappings of international publishing networks Proposals are due October 2nd, 2025. We welcome submissions by graduate students and early career researchers. ### [Modernism Otherwise: Global Modernisms Across Asia and Beyond](https://www.acla.org/seminar/4fcb2194-074e-41ce-9072-3db3411dc8bf) As the globalization of modernist studies continues to generate new axes of comparison and fresh perspectives on the multiple temporalities of literary modernity, transnational histories of global modernisms have drawn increasing attention. In response, projects such as *NONWESTLIT* have opened new directions for rethinking modernism through its global and multifaceted interconnections, moving beyond the canonical boundaries of the Global North. Building on this impetus, this seminar aims to foster dialogue on the intersections of modernist aesthetics across diverse non-Western literary and cultural traditions. Challenging the tendency to conceptualize non-Western modernisms as derivative, we seek to foreground the polycentric emergence of modernisms across Asia and other cultural spaces beyond the Global North, where writers, artists, critics, and translators engaged with modernism through innovation, translation, and adaptation, navigating rapid political, linguistic, and cultural transformations. The seminar intends to stimulate comparative approaches to modernisms and literary modernities across Asian and other non-Western cultural spaces (including, but not limited to, Turkish, Persian, Arab, Russian, East Asian, South and Southeast Asian, as well as African, and Latin American traditions) debating issues such as the role of intermediality and intertextuality in shaping modernist aesthetics, the circulation of material and intellectual networks (books, periodicals, visual and performative arts), and the philosophies of time and layered temporalities that define experiences of modernization. We invite proposals that examine literary modernism from a global perspective, centering on Asia and other non-Western cultural spaces and challenging Eurocentric narratives across literature, visual art, architecture, music, and beyond. For further inquiries, please contact Enver A. Akova () and Luo Jia (). ### [Paper Pushers and Ink Suckers: Objectifying the Administrative Subject in Bureaucratic Fiction](https://www.acla.org/seminar/3ebf827b-3346-4289-89c3-8496f163cea4) **Organizers: Karolin Schäfer & Alexandra Irimia** The mundane objects of office life—typewriters, filing cabinets, rubber stamps, corridors—function as more than mere background in literary representations of bureaucracy. From the “ronds-de-cuir” of Georges Courteline’s 1893 satirical bureaucrats to the “chupatintas” of Latin American administrative fiction to be found in Roberto Mariani’s *Cuentos de la oficina* (1925), writers across cultures have deployed office paraphernalia as both material reality and metaphorical framework for exploring the dehumanizing mechanisms of modern administrative systems. This panel investigates how authors worldwide use workplace objects to critique, reimagine, and resist bureaucratic power structures, transforming clerks into “pen/paper pushers” and reducing human agency to the mechanical repetition of administrative tasks. We invite papers that examine office paraphernalia through multiple theoretical and cultural lenses: **Material Culture and Administrative Power**: How do objects like staplers, typewriters, and filing systems become instruments of control and/or resistance? Papers might explore the evolution from mechanical to digital office technologies, examining how authors represent the changing relationship between human labor and administrative machinery. **Spatial Politics of the Office**: The office as literary space—from the protective “womb” of bureaucratic routine to the devouring institutional body. We encourage analysis of inside/outside dynamics, hierarchical spatial arrangements, and the literary representation of corridors, cubicles, and executive suites as sites of class and gender negotiation. **Transnational Bureaucratic Aesthetics**: Comparative approaches to office culture across literary traditions. How do different national literatures deploy similar objects (the typewriter, the file, the rubber stamp) to critique administrative systems? What cultural specificities emerge in representations of clerical labor? **The Clerk’s Body as Capital**: Investigations of how administrative subjects are transformed into extensions of office machinery, examining the relationship between human embodiment and bureaucratic function through material objects (office wear, office technologies, desktop staples, ergonomic arrangements, storage facilities and retrieval devices, etc.) Comparative and transnational approaches are especially but not exclusively encouraged. Papers may draw upon: - Material culture studies and thing theory - Media archaeology and document studies - Labor studies and workplace literature criticism - Postcolonial approaches to administrative systems - Sound studies and the acoustic environment of bureaucracy - Gender studies and the feminization/masculinization of office work ### [Reading Marx Beyond Western Europe](https://www.acla.org/seminar/b2cef80c-ef1e-4c64-be37-ea11a75596ad) **Organizers: Siwei Wang & Yiming Ma** Marx and Marxism have always had a fraught relationship with geographies beyond Western Europe. In *Orientalism*, Edward Said famously argues that Marx’s writings on India express sympathy for the suffering of the colonized but ultimately reproduce Romantic Orientalist tropes through concepts like the “Asiatic Mode of Production” and “Oriental Despotism.” Cedric Robinson critiques Marx for severing the analysis of slavery from that of capitalism and argues that Marxism’s emphasis on the industrial working class sidelines other (racialized) actors in revolutionary struggles and proves ill-equipped to interrogate anti-imperialist movements in the 20th century. Yet some critics have sought to counter this more conventional Eurocentric image of Marx by conducting a true philological (re)reading of Marx’s most canonical works, by delving into his underexplored/unpublished writings, and by looking at subsequent theorists and political militants’ development of the Marxist tradition according to the conditions of their times. Harry Harootunian’s scholarship, for example, urges us to deprovincialize Marx and resituate his thought in lived historical specificities of non-western societies. This seminar invites papers that build on these debates and tackle a core tension not only within Marxism but also particularly pronounced in the encounter between Marxism and postcolonialism, that is, the tension between the necessity of grasping capitalism as a totality and the need to acknowledge the irreducible differences among regions (e.g., the theory of combined and uneven development). If the studies of comparative and world literature are still undergirded mainly by the vocabularies and logics of capitalism, then what would happen to these disciplines when we begin to read Marxist theory as a global phenomenon? Likewise, what critical pressure do Marx and Marxism exert on the burgeoning frameworks of postcolonial and Global South comparatism as well as comparative subalternities? How can a series of critical, situated, and close readings of Marx perform the task of training imagination and rearranging desires to contain the march of capitalism, to make Marxism truly global (Spivak 2017)? Topics may include: The translations, circulations, and receptions of Marx’s thought in non-western societies; The indigenization, reimagination, and reappropriation of Marx’s universal categories; Transnational exchanges between global leftist traditions; Characteristics of capital accumulation and labor movements in non-western societies; Marxism and subalternity; Marxism and Third World feminism; Racial capitalism; Ecological Marxist perspectives on non-western environments; The studies of world literature in the Marxist vein; The intersection between Marxism, postcolonialism, and Global South studies; Marxist aesthetics in non-western societies; Marxism and theories and methods of comparison ### [Translating, Publishing, and Teaching: Canadian Literature as World Literature](https://www.acla.org/seminar/8c9a23e4-155b-4094-b3ac-fb9615bff4e1) **Organizers: Nefise Kahraman & Hande Gürses** This panel invites proposals that explore Canadian literature through the lens of world literature, attending to issues of multilingualism, diaspora, and the construction of literary canons. How can the frameworks and methodologies of world literature inform or reshape our understanding of Canadian literature - a body of writing that resists singular narratives and is inherently multilingual and diasporic? In what ways do practices of teaching, publishing, and translating world literature within Canada - particularly in educational institutions, small presses, and literary communities - participate in the reimagining of Canadian literary identity? We especially welcome papers that explore how world literature can foster the inclusion of marginalized voices - indigenous, immigrant, exilic, and otherwise - in the ongoing development of Canadian literature. To what extent does world literature offer tools for unsettling dominant literary paradigms and for constructing a Canadian canon that is dynamic, plural, and reflective of the country’s complex cultural realities? Papers may consider comparative approaches, case studies, pedagogical strategies, translation networks, or institutional frameworks that highlight the interplay between world literature and Canadian literary production. Potential topics might include: - Small press strategies for transnational literary circulation in Canada - Pedagogical frameworks for teaching translated world literatures in Canadian classrooms - Indigeneity and settler colonialism in translation and reception - Multilingualism and its representation in Canada - Publishing infrastructures and the global mobility of texts - Canon formation through translation and institutional adoption - World literature in Canadian classrooms and national literature departments: inclusion and omission - Translated literature as a site of cultural negotiation - Cross-cultural frameworks for the representations of gender, race, and ethnicity ### [World Literature Through the Spectrum of Digital Humanities; Textual Geographies and Technologies of Decentralization](https://www.acla.org/seminar/65659de7-cc35-4a64-98c6-f33019e7b1de) **Organizers: Mustapha Ait Kharouach & Eid Mohamed** Digitizing literature and textualizing the digital have been the key feature of today’s humane world that puts severe emphasis on the way to artificialize texts, literatures, figures and knowledge at large. With such case of emerging call for intelligence, one can only be more skeptical about the drastic change the digital sphere brought into the meaning and the geography of the texts, authors, and readers as it manipulates the truth turning it into something phantomatic. And yet, digital humanities tools proved to be somehow efficient when used to read literatures of the world by using distant reading strategy when searching for networks and scopes of texts than the close ones. Either way, the question remains whether digitalization of texts and its annexes can help worldling literatures or minoring them in different directions, in the sense that literatures circulate well outside their home making it reachable and domesticable. In addition, pandemics and online communities have disrupted the ordinarily physical human contact towards which significant efforts have been made to keep it digitized as possible, the fact that shapes our understanding and perception of virtualized literatures and its incorporated spaces, themes, and effects. The main concept behind this seminar is that rich data can provide a unique way of knowledge access about social and cultural change through the lens of literary production. It can provide us with much more insights than any other traditional method of storage. The main problem of digital archives is that, while it is relatively easy to collect large amounts of data, and yet making use of data is a completely different story. While we can easily store thousands of literary works, it is the analysis of these works that can be of benefit to knowledge synthesis and accumulation. Potential subjects and areas of investigation for this panel include, but are not limited to: - How can digital humanities shape our humane experiences of literature? - Does it suggests/offers other avenues of interpretation? - Can the digital sphere brought intelligence into the way we read and taste literature? - Technical challenges of DH with non-anglophone and non-Latin material works. - Postcolonial DH and World Literature. - Critique of DH in Literary Studies. - Evaluating digital scholarship in World Literature. - Can we still maintain the same meaning and demarcations of geography of texts in how they affect their horizons. - Does the digital sphere revisit the crossing, circulation and translation of literary texts? - What are the new channels of worldling minor and marginalized literatures through the prism of digitalization and virtualizing of literatures.) ## ## Latest News [### Ankhi Mukherjee elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature ](/news/2026/06/ankhi-mukherjee-elected-fellow-royal-society-literature) June 30, 2026 [### Mitsuyoshi Numano receives the Imperial Prize and the Japan Art Academy Prize for outstanding achievements in the field of world literature ](/news/2026/05/mitsuyoshi-numano-receives-imperial-prize-and-japan-art-academy-prize-outstanding) May 03, 2026 [### IWL Director, Debjani Ganguly, fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities ](/news/2025/12/iwl-director-debjani-ganguly-fellow-australian-academy-humanities) December 20, 2025 [### IWL Executive Committee Member, Professor Mitsuyoshi Numano, laureate of the Tsubouchi Shoyo Grand Prize ](/news/2025/12/iwl-executive-committee-member-professor-mitsuyoshi-numano-laureate-tsubouchi-shoyo) December 20, 2025 [### "The power to use my original language: the Hungarian language." 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