Plenary lectures
Special Event, July 16: A Reading and Conversation with Georgi Gospodinov
Georgi Gospodinov (1968) is the International Booker Prize winning author of Time Shelter for 2023.
The novel is published in more than 20 languages. „It’s the most exquisite kind of literature,“ according to Olga Tockarczuk, the Nobel Prize winning writer. 'Could not be more timely... A writer of great warmth as well as skill' (Guardian). In 2022, Time Shelter was The New Yorker, Guardian and Financial Times book of the year. Georgi Gospodinov became internationally known with his previous novels, Natural Novel and The Physics of Sorrow (both translated in more than 30 languages).
He is the winner of the Premio Strega Europeo (2021), the Central European Angelus Award (2019), the Jan Michalski Prize (2016), etc.
Gospodinov’s works include poetry, nonfiction, essays, theatre plays, visual social The Slap Factory and Future Cancelled, and many other. “The Crevices of the Cannon. Provinces, airplanes, and lexicons” is his book of essays in literary history and sociology of literature. His complex narratives are engaged with the memory of the recent Eastern-European past and the present anxieties of Europe and the world.
Gospodinov is associate professor at the Institute for Literature, BAS, Sofia. He teaches creative writing at the Sofia University and was awarded a number of fellowships in Europe and in the USA, among which the one at the Cullman Center (NYPL), at the Columbia/Harriman institute and at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin).
July 10: Ástráður Eysteinsson, "What an Island Translates"
Ástráður Eysteinsson is professor of Comparative Literature (since 1994) at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik where he also served as Dean of Humanities from 2008 to 2015. He is affiliate professor of Icelandic literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, and has been a visiting professor at universities in the US, Canada, and Denmark. He has worked in the areas of literary and cultural theory (including place studies and island studies), modernism, and translation studies, and is a practicing translator. His publications include co-translations of most of Franz Kafka’s narrative works into Icelandic, numerous articles in the areas of literary, cultural and translation studies, and four books: The Concept of Modernism (1990), Tvímæli (on translation and translation studies, 1996), Umbrot (on literature and modernity, 1999), and Orðaskil (on literary translation, 2017). He has edited several books, including Heimur skáldsögunnar (The World of the Novel, 2001) The Cultural Reconstruction of Places (2006), Translation – Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (with Daniel Weissbort, 2006), and Modernism (with Vivian Liska, 2 vols., 2007).
July 17: Special Panel: “Violence, Memory, and Literary Writing in Cyprus.” Ch. Antonis Balasopoulos. Writers: Maria A. Ioannou, Constantia Soteriou, Lisa Suhair Majaj
Chaired by Antonis Balasopoulos, Associate Professor at the University of Cyprus, this panel is dedicated to a conversation with Cypriot contemporary writers Maria A. Ioannou, Constantia Soteriou, and Lisa Suhair Majaj. It will investigate a set of questions concerning the place of memory and the question of violence in the literary practice of three contemporary authors writing in Cyprus: their approach to the relationship between memory and history; their approach to the potential gaps and tensions in the relation between individual and collective memory; trauma, as the name of the intersection between memory and violence; the interplay of memory and forgetting in the context of “imagining the nation”; the problem of the potential commodification or officialization of a certain discourse on trauma; and, finally, the writers’ response to the relation between national and transnational histories and audiences.
Maria A. Ioannou is an award-winning writer, creative writing tutor, and festival curator (SARDAM interdisciplinary literature
festival) based in Cyprus (PhD Creative Writing, University of Winchester / MA 20th-century Literature, King’s College London / BA English Literature, University of Reading). In 2019, she received the Vice-Chancellor’s Excellence in Research Award. She writes and performs in Greek, English and the Greek-Cypriot dialect. Her work was nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net. She has published three short fiction collections and two fairytales in Cyprus and Greece:
The Gigantic Fall of an Eyelash – Gavrielides Publishing, 2011 (Emerging Writer National Literature Award)
Cauldron – Nefeli Publishing, 2015 (Shortlisted for the Young Writer Award by the Greek magazine Klepsydra)
Inbetweens – Nefeli Publishing, 2022 (Shortlisted for Hartis Book Awards in Greece / Short Story National Literature Award)
The Fly and the Jug – Patakis Publishing, 2019 (illustrations: Philippos Theodorides)
My Mum is an Astronaut – Telia Books, 2023 (illustrations: Vassilis Koutsoyiannis)
More info: www.maria-alpha-ioannou.com
Constantia Soteriou is a writer from Cyprus and born in Nicosia in 1975. Her novels ‘Aishe Goes on Vacation’ and ‘Voices Made of Soil’ were shortlisted for the Greek and Cypriot National Book Awards. Her short story, “Death Customs”
, translated into English by Lina Protopapa, was the winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. “Bitter Country” (Patakis, 2020) revolves around the final moments of the mother of an eighteen-year-old boy who went missing in the 1974 coup d’état. Her most recent book Brandy Sour (Patakis, 2022), a novel set in the 22 rooms of the iconic Ledra Palace Hotel in Nicosia, won the 2023 National Book Prize in Cyprus and was translated into English by Lina Protopapa (Foundry Editions). Soteriou has written plays for independent theatre companies and the Cyprus Theatre Organization.
Lisa Suhair Majaj (BA American University of Beirut, MA English Literature, MA American Culture, PhD American culture University of Michigan) is an internationally-published Palestinian-American poet, writer, and scholar. Her collection Geographies of Light won the 2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize.
She is currently working on two poetry books. She has given readings across the USA, UK, Cyprus, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Germany, Tunisia, and India, including Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies, London Southbank’s Poetry International, Palestine Writes, and World Court of Women against War, for Peace (Bangalore). Her poetry was displayed in the 2016 Harn Museum of Art exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War: America and the Middle East. Her scholarly work includes the co-edited volumes Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse University Press), Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland Publishing), Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland/Routledge) and the forthcoming Companion to Arab American Literature (Routledge). Her recent literary publications include poems in SCRIPTA 61, The Raven Review, Writers Resist, Vox Populi, and Poets Respond. She can be reached at lisamajaj@gmail.com.
Antonis Balasopoulos is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English Studies, University of Cyprus.
His research focuses on comparative utopian studies, political philosophy and political theory, Marxist cultural criticism, American literature, postcolonial literature, and visual studies. His most recent publications include work on Franz Kafka (Cultural Critique, 2024), Fredric Jameson (in Rethinking Democracy for Post-Utopian Worlds, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), the history and ideology of utopia from antiquity to the late nineteenth century (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2023 and forthcoming) and literary daydreaming (in Utopia, Equity and Ideology in Urban Texts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He has also co-edited Reading Texts on Sovereignty with Stella Achilleos (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022) and edited A.L. Morton’s The English Utopia (Peter Lang, 2023). As creative writer, he published four poetry collections, a short story collection, a novella, and three books of aphorisms, allegories, and essays. He was distinguished with the Republic of Cyprus State Award for best book in short fiction for his The Cube and Other Stories (2021). His The Book of Creatures (2021) was shortlisted for best poetry collection. He’s also a literary translator to and from English and has published an anthology of translated American poetry: New England: Dickinson, Frost, Stevens (2022).
July 22: Maria Margaroni, “Caring for Antigone: The Delinquent Child and Sophie Deraspe’s Cinematic Pharmacopoetics”
Maria Margaroni is Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Feminist Thought at the University of Cyprus.
She has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh) and the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (University of Leeds). She has published extensively on the work of Julia Kristeva in peer-reviewed journals and collected volumes. She is the co-author of Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (with John Lechte, Continuum, 2004). Other publications include three special issues and four edited volumes, most recently Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (with Arleen Ionescu, Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) and Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2023).
July 24: Djelal Kadir, "Connecting Solitudes”
Djelal Kadir is an autochthonous Cypriot who found an exilic home in world literature, in which he has read and on which he has written and taught for the past fifty years. He is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
at Pennsylvania State University and, most recently, Visiting Professor at La Sapienza, University of Rome (2016). Kadir has previously led seminars at the Harvard, Istanbul, and Lisbon sessions of the Institute for World Literature. He is a member of the founding board of the Institute for World Literature, of Synapsis: The European School of Comparative Studies, and of the Stockholm Collegium of Literary History. He is the Founding President of the International American Studies Association and former Editor of the international quarterly World Literature Today and Director of the Neustadt International Prize in Literature. His authored books include: Juan Carlos Onetti (Twayne, 1977), Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology (University of California Press, 1992); The Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays in Latin America's Writing Culture (Purdue UP, 1993); Questing Fictions: Latin America's Family Romance (University of Minnesota Press, 1987) and Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (Stanford UP, 2011). He is the Co-editor of the Routledge Companion to World Literature (2012; 2022), the Co-Editor of Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History (Oxford UP, 2004), and of the Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004). He is Co-Editor of Literature: A World History and Principal Editor of Vol 4, Twentieth Century (Wiley Blackwell, 2022). Kadir’s most recent book project is “Apocryphal Posts from the Far Ends of Solitude,” an essay on solitude and thirty-nine letters from mythological and historical figures who found themselves in predicaments of solitude in extremis, from Europa of ancient Crete and Ariadne of Naxos to Marguerite Yourcenar on Mount Desert Island in the twentieth-century. His IWL plenary lecture is based on this project.
July 29: Gisèle Sapiro, "The Nobel Prize and the formation of world literary canon: from eurocentrism to inclusiveness”
Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Research director at the CNRS, member of Academia Europaea, silver Medal of the CNRS 2021. Her areas of interest are the sociology of culture, of literature, of intellectuals, of translation, and of the circulation of ideas. false
She is the author of The French Writers’ War 1940-1953 (Duke UP, 2014 [French original : 1999]), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France, XIXe-XXIe siècle (Seuil 2011), The Sociology of Literature (Stanford UP in press ; French original : La Sociologie de la littérature, La Découverte 2014 ; transl. Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, Bulgarian), Los Intelectuales : profesionalizacion, politizacion, internationalizacion (Eduvim, Cordoba, 2017), Les Ecrivains et la politique en France (Seuil 2018), Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur ? (Seuil 2020 ; transl. Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish ; forth. Dutch and Korean), Des mots qui tuent. La responsabilité de l’intellectuel en temps de crise, 1944-1953 (Points Seuil 2020).
Among the books she (co)edited : Pour une histoire de sciences sociales (Fayard 2004), Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (Fayard 2004), Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (CNRS Editions 2008) ;Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (Nouveau Monde 2009 ; trans. Spanish) ; L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (La Découverte 2009) ; Traduire la littérature et les sciences humaines (DEPS 2012) ; Sciences humaines en traduction (Institut français 2014) ; Profession ? Ecrivain (CNRS Eds 2017) ; Ideas on the move in the Social Sciences and Humanities : The International Circulation of Paradigms and Theorists (Palgrave 2020) ; Dictionnaire international Bourdieu (CNRS Eds 2020 ; forth. in Arabic and Turkish).
July 30: Paulo Horta, "Shahrazad and Hanna Diyab: Storytellers of The 1001 Nights"
This talk looks at the storytellers of the 1001 Nights, from Shahrazad, teller of the tales in the original Arabic core of the Nights, to Hanna Diyab, the Syrian behind the addition to the story collection in French in the early 1700s of the most famous tales in world literature and film “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Pari Banu.” Shahrazad as storyteller rather than as love interest or lover emerges more clearly from a variant version of the frame tale also included in the One Hundred and One Nights, a sister story collection that many scholars date earlier than the 1001 Nights, and place in the Maghreb, rather in the Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo that generated the core tales of the Arabic core. Hanna Diyab, the storyteller as creator rather than as repository of stories, emerges more clearly from new sources including his own Book of Travels. A focus on these two storytellers in a new light suggests different ways of approaching the 1001 Nights as literary and worldly from the story collection as it appears in recent anthologies and discussions of world literature.
Paulo Lemos Horta is the author of books that center the agency of people silenced in literary history,
Marvelous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights; Aladdin and The Annotated Arabian Nights (with Yasmine Seale), Approaches to Teaching the 1001 Nights, and Cosmopolitanisms (with Bruce Robbins; Horta also translated Santiago’s “The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor”). Horta’s writing has been translated into several languages and received accolades including nonfiction book of the year in the Canadian press and notable book of the year mention in the American (Buzzfeed, Wall Street Journal). He has written for PMLA, Words Without Borders, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, and been a featured writer at festivals hosted at the British Library, Toronto, Dubai, and Jaipur. His next scholarly monograph takes this behind-the-scenes attention to overlooked actors to the realm of publishing. He has himself been published with Harvard University Press, Liveright, a literary imprint of W.W. Norton, and has signed with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. At Harvard’s Institute for World Literature he served as a member of the board for two terms and also as faculty. He also served for two terms on the executive board at the International Comparative Literature Association, for which he co-organized a workshop on publishing at Princeton. Prior to joining NYUAD, where he is associate professor of creative writing and literature, he founded and designed a world literature program in Vancouver, Canada.