OSL Seminar: Contemporary Debates in Life Writing

Amsterdam | April – May 2022, exact dates to be confirmed
This course focuses on contemporary debates in life writing as a newly emerging field across disciplines. Life writing is an umbrella term for a wide range of writings about one’s own or someone else’s life, such as biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, bio-fiction and travel writing. In the course we will explore various life stories of men and women in the 20th and 21st centuries, who each had their own unique set of life experiences, beliefs and perceptions. This will help gain a richer understanding of how individuals move through, interact with, and are affected by the major events of their time — and how their lives are narrated, either by themselves or by others.

OSL PhD Day 2021: Full Programme

Online | 11 June 2021

We are delighted to announce that we have secured a date and two wonderful keynote speakers for our upcoming PhD Day on the theme “The Different Uses of Literature Today and Possible Futures for Literary Studies”. The PhD day will take place on 11 June 2021 and will consist of a full-day program.

OSL/NICA Symposium ‘Posthuman Futures in Literature and Art’

Posthuman Futures in Literature and Art

Online | Thursday 3 June (10:00-15:30) and Friday 4 June 2021 (10:00-16:00)

This symposium is co-sponsored by the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL) and the Netherlands Institute for Critical Analysis (NICA); it reflects a shared wish to increase hybridity between artists and scholars, in order to create spaces for affirmative ethics (Braidotti, 2017) and “thinking with” (de la Bellacasa, 2012) alternative onto-epistemologies. The interdisciplinary framework of this event intends to foment collaboration between artists, scholars and researchers, with the purpose to explore and reflect on the advancement in artistic research and literary studies in questions of the posthuman.

New Regularization Law in Colombia: Event with Pablo Valdivia

Online | 19 March 2021, 16:00-18:00 (Groningen time)
OSL Academic Director Pablo Valdivia (University of Groningen) is one of the experts who contributed to the drafting of the recently approved new regularization law that will benefit 2 million Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. This law was signed by the Colombian Government and welcomed by United Nations, US and Human Rights institutions from all over the world.

Summer School: Literature and the Digital Humanities

Online | 31 May – 2 June 2021 | 2EC

From May 31 to June 2, 2021, an online Summer School for Literary Studies & Digital Humanities will be hosted by Leiden University with the support of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL). The focus will be on recent academic research in Literary Studies at the intersection with Digital Humanities. Lectures and interactive workshops will be given by experts in the field, such as Mike Kestemont, Bertrand Westphal, Fred Truyen, Jan Baetens, Peter Verhaar, Krista Murchison, Fresco Sam-Sin e.a.

Book Presentation: Christel N. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology

Online event | 19 February 2021
Time: 16:00-17:30 (Amsterdam time)
Credits: 1 (attendance + short assignments; details to be announced)
Christel Temple is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her latest book, Black Cultural Mythology (SUNY, 2020), provides a highly innovative conceptual framework for exploring the complex relations between cultural memory, heroic narratives, activism and creative production within and beyond the African diaspora. 

NISIS/OSL Workshop: Muslim Worlds / World Literatures

Online workshop (NISIS/OSL) | 12 February 2021, 12:00-18:00 | 2-3 ECs

This workshop is the first collaboration between the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS) and the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL). As suggested by the plurals in the title, the event aims to question univocal views of both Muslim culture and world literature. On the one hand, we will consider Muslim worlds in their diversity, as opposed to representations of Islam as a dominant, stable essence. On the other, we will problematize the notion of world literature by way of interrogating its multiple definitions and socio-political implications. From One Thousand and One Nights to the latest novel by Jokha Alharthi, we will explore the different ways in which Muslim cultures have shaped (and have been shaped by) the world’s literary landscape.

OSL Course: Computational Literary Studies

OSL Course: Computational Literary Studies

University of Amsterdam | April – May 2021
In this course, students will get introduced to the most important current approaches in computational literary studies, ranging from the analysis of style and methods for the verification and attribution of authorship to various forms of ‘distant reading’ and discourse analysis.

OSL Seminar: Contemporary Debates in Life Writing

OSL Seminar: Contemporary Debates in Life Writing

Online | Wednesdays 7, 14, 21 April, 12 and 19 May 2021 – 14.00-17.00
This course focuses on contemporary debates in life writing as a newly emerging field across disciplines. Life writing is an umbrella term for a wide range of writings about one’s own or someone else’s life, such as biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, bio-fiction and travel writing.