Category Archives: Archive

2014 Literary Spaces and Communities II (Wadham College, Oxford)

A one-day meeting funded by the Leverhulme Trust, in which participants followed up questions raised at the Berlin 2013 meeting to work towards the publication of a special themed issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies. The day featured original papers as well as discussions of pre-circulated work in progress and a seminar session on transnational literary history and the history of cosmopolitanism.

 

Wadham College Oxford

2013 Literary Spaces and Communities I (Centre for British Studies, Berlin)

Eight papers discussing how literature creates communities of authors and readers that are rooted in specific places (such as Dieppe, Florence, Rome, Venice, Bruges, London, Copenhagen and Paris) and yet transcend linguistic and national borders. The meeting, funded by the Humboldt University’s Kosmos programme, was followed by a tour of literary sights associated with Weimar Berlin, as seen particularly through the works of Isherwood.

2012 Writing 1900: Objects (Centre for British Studies, Berlin)

Each participant presented on one object that exemplifies a narrative or mode of transition that took place around the year 1900. The discussion focused on how to create a productive dialogue between the study of material culture / object theory and literary studies. Case studies included barbed wire, jewellery, memorial sculpture, photographs, postcards, round mirrors, the telephone, the trilby hat and the vacuum cleaner.

2012 Transit/Transition (Seminarzentrum Gut Siggen)

A four-day workshop held in the Gut Siggen Seminar Centre, thanks to the support of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation. It featured a mixture of seminars, case studies and brainstorming sessions. In advance of the meeting, participants were asked to read a number of articles and book chapters outlining specific methodological and theoretical questions in comparative and trans-national studies. The aim of this longer workshop was to consolidate the identity of the group and to create a space where participants would feel free to explore theories of cultural/literary exchange and cultural mediation away from the standard format of academic conferences.

2011 Internationalist and Interartistic Writing Around 1900 (Trinity College, Oxford)

This workshop, funded by the John Fell Fund, focused on the cross-pollination between internationalism and inter-artistic practice in English and European literature in the period that could be termed the long fin de siècle (roughly 1880-1920). The workshop was divided in two parts that focused, respectively, on the question of drama / performance and on the theme of identity.

2010 Turn-of-the Century European Literary and Cultural History: A New Approach (Centre for British Studies, Berlin)

The 2010 Berlin workshop was the first meeting of a core group of scholars interested in the challenges of writing transnational literary and cultural histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The day was divided into two sessions. The morning focused on approaches (comparative literature, imagology, cultural exchange, and transnational history/histoire croisée). The afternoon on case studies of authors whose works resist standard literary periodisation as well as straightforward national and genre classification (Yvan Goll, Mina Loy and Oscar Wilde).