#  Plenary lectures 

 



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### Meet the writer

## July 8: A reading and conversation with Judith Schalansky

**The event will be chaired by David Damrosch. Special guest: the translator Imogen Taylor.**

   ![J. Schalansky](/sites/g/files/omnuum6391/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-02/J_Schalansky_by_Michela_Di_Savino.jpeg?itok=MjxKNBTW) 

 

Judith Schalansky, born in Greifswald in former East Germany in 1980, is an acclaimed writer and book designer, and the publisher of a prestigious natural history imprint in Berlin. Her books, including *Atlas of Remote Islands*, the novel *The Giraffe’s Neck*, and the International Booker Prize and National Book Award nominee *An Inventory of Losses*, have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and have received numerous awards. Her recent book *Marmor, Quecksilber, Nebel* (*Marble, Mercury, Mist*) will be published in German this spring.

© Michela\_Di\_Savino

   ![Imogen Taylor](/sites/g/files/omnuum6391/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-03/Taylor_Imogen_168.jpeg?itok=5IdYL_sN) 

 

**Imogen Taylor** was born in London in 1978 and has been living in Berlin since 2001. She has translated work by Alfred Döblin, Julia Franck and Dana Grigorcea, and is currently working on the first volumes of Peter Kurzeck’s autobiographical project *The Old Century*. In 2024 she was runner-up in the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Sasha Salzmann’s *Glorious People*.

© Jürgen Bauer


### Plenary lectures by the IWL faculty

## June 29: Stefano Evangelista, *World Literature and the World City*

   ![Stefano Evangelista 2](/sites/g/files/omnuum6391/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/iwl/files/stefano_evangelista_2.jpg?itok=wNrZPb50) 

 

Critics are fond of pointing out the geographical origin of the modern idea of world literature in the German city of Weimar, where Goethe first formulated it. Indeed, the global outlook of world literature is always necessarily mediated from a local perspective. How does the embodied point of view of a particular city affect the concept and material reality of world literature as a "mode of circulation and reading" (Damrosch)? Stefano Evangelista's talk will address this question by focusing on the case of Berlin, the first modern capital that styled itself as "Weltstadt" or world city.

## July 1: Elleke Boehmer, *Southern Imagining: a literary and cultural history of the far southern hemisphere*

   ![Elleke Boehmer](/sites/g/files/omnuum6391/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-10/ED%20Boehmer_author%20picture_2025.jpg?itok=a1AWoY93) 

 

My presentation will ask why we might look at the world from the far southern latitudes more frequently than we do--from those angles that are mostly absent from western or northern histories and philosophies--and how the reading of southern writers like Zakes Mda, Witi Ihimaera, Alexis Wright and Zoe Wicomb helps us to achieve this view.

**Elleke Boehmer** is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society. She is an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her work includes literary and cultural history, criticism and fiction. She is the author of *Postcolonial Poetics* (2018); *Indian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire* (2015; winner of the biennial ESSE prize 2016); *Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920* (2002); *Stories of Women* (2005); and the field-defining *Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors* (1995; second edition 2005). Her acclaimed biography Nelson Mandela in the prestigious Very Short Introduction series in 2008, was followed by an expanded second edition in 2023. *Southern Imagining: a literary and cultural history of the Southern Hemisphere* (Princeton), her seventh monograph, was published in late 2025. Elleke Boehmer’s fiction includes *To the Volcano, and other stories* (2019; commended for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize), her second collection of short stories, and *The Shouting in the Dark* (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize 2018). Her sixth novel *Ice Shock* appeared in tandem with *Southern Imagining*. Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. In 2024 she held the inaugural International Visiting Fellowship at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is a member of the Netherlands Society of Letters and a Rhodes Trustee. She holds an honorary doctorate from Linnaeus University, Sweden.


## **July 13: David Damrosch,** ***V**ernacular Revolutions*

   ![David 2025](/sites/g/files/omnuum6391/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-10/David%20Talk.jpeg?itok=XZsRSwDA) 

 

The world's ancient scripts were anonymously created and elaborated over the course of centuries, but in the modern era revolutionary new scripts began to be developed, to supplement or replace the traditional ones, whether for religious or political purposes. In this talk, I'll look at the new scripts and alphabets developed in the 1400s by Guru Nanak in Punjab and at the command of King Sejong in Korea, by Jesuits in eighteenth-century Indochina, and by Kamal Atatürk in the 1920s. All four scripts have become emblems of modern national identity, and shape their writers' oblique participation in a globalizing world.

**David Damrosch** is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Founding Director and Chair of the Executive Committee of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. His books include *What Is World Literature?* (2003), *The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh* (2007), *How to Read World Literature*(2d. ed. 2017), and *Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age* (2020)*.* He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman anthologies of British Literature and of World Literature, editor of *World Literature in Theory* (2014), and co-editor of *The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature*, and of two collections in Chinese, *Theories of World* *Literature* (2013) and *New Directions in Comparative Literature* (2010).


## **July 15: Francesca Orsini,** ***Thinking through Space: For a ground-up, located and multilingual approach to world literature***

   ![rsz_francescaorsini-sept_2016.jpg](/sites/g/files/omnuum6391/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/iwl/files/rsz_francescaorsini-sept_2016.jpg?itok=o7iea-zF) 

 

Drawing on geographer Doreen Massey’s definition of space as “the multiplicity of stories and trajectories so far” and on my recent book *East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature,* this talk employs space heuristically and at different levels.

Space directs our attention to the concrete location of literary practices, to different communities of taste, and to how texts and tastes circulated across them. Proximity in “multilingual locals” highlights dialogism within texts, explains choices of language register, and helps us imagine audiences overhearing texts not directly meant for them. The lens of space helps us bring together archives in different languages, search for multilingual clues, and probe the silences of each archive about the other languages, authors, and tastes around it.

This is not an exercise in nostalgia, but a way to account for literary texts and practices in ways better suited to the multilingual society from which they emerged and in which they circulated, to develop a different relationship to languages in the present, and to imagine a noisier and more crowded world literature.

**Francesca Orsin**i is a literary historian interested in bringing a located and multilingual perspective to Indian literary history and world literature. She is the author of *The Hindi Public Sphere* (2002), *Print and Pleasure* (2009), and *East of Delhi: Multilingual literary culture and world literature* (2023), and the editor of, among others, *Love in South Asia: A Cultural History* (2006), *Hinglish Live* (2022, with Ravikant), and *The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form* (2022, with Neelam Srivastava and Laetitia Zecchini). She co-edits with Debjani Ganguly the series *Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures*, and with Whitney Cox the forthcoming *Cambridge History of Indian Literature.* She is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

## **July 20: Galin Tihanov,** ***Changing Modalities: World Literature in the Shifting Landscape of Knowledge Production***

   ![GalinTihanov](/sites/g/files/omnuum6391/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-01/GalinTihanov.jpg?itok=LGnBATj2) 

 

In this lecture, I wоuld like to explore the place of world literature in the landscape of the humanities and literary studies today, looking more closely at how world literature as a field relates to the changing modalities of knowledge production and consumption. This means reflecting on the epistemology of world literature, its methodological premises, its history, and its potential of enabling us to think literature differently.

**Galin Tihanov** is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has held visiting professorships at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Tihanov is the author of seven books, including *The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond* (Stanford UP, 2019) which won the 2020 AATSEEL Book Prize for “best book in literary studies”. *World Literature in the Soviet Union* (ASP, 2023), of which Tihanov is the lead editor, received the 2024 AATSEEL Book Prize for “best edited multi-author scholarly volume”. He has been elected to the British Academy (2021) and to Academia Europaea (2012). He serves on the Executive Board of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University and as Honorary Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, CASS, Beijing, as well as on the advisory boards of universities and foundations in the United States, China, Germany, and other countries. He is also Past President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. His current work is on world literature, cosmopolitanism, and exile.