Past Sessions

Group 019

Global in its aims and practice, the IWL holds its sessions in different locales around the world. Following our inaugural session at Peking University in 2011, the Institute met at Bilgi University in Istanbul in 2012, at Harvard in 2013, at City University of Hong Kong in 2014, at the University of Lisbon in 2015, and at Harvard again in 2016, at the University of Copenhagen in 2017, at the University of Tokyo in 2018. In 2019, IWL returned at Harvard for a third time. In 2020 and 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, IWL held its annual session online. In 2022, the 12th session took place at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and in 2023 we returned to Harvard. Beyond the seminars, lectures and panels offered at each session, we organize outings and cultural events that enable our participants to immerse themselves in the local culture, to experience literature both in its local specificity and its worldliness, and to interact productively with colleagues outside the boundaries of the formal sessions themselves. Our ultimate goal is to build a wide-ranging academic community that continues after the program ends through ongoing collaborations and exchanges. In this way, beyond a theoretical and methodological approach, world literature becomes as well a way of thinking and of reshaping our lives.