27 October 2025 | Utrecht University
While serving as a meeting occasion for the entire OSL community, the 2025 OSL Research Day will take the shape of a symposium focusing on a specific theme – namely the intersections of Medical Humanities and Affect Theory, examining how literature and cultural narratives mediate experiences of illness, embodiment, and care. The symposium asks: how do literary and artistic representations of illness shape the way we suffer, heal, and endure? How does affect – pain, anxiety, hope, frustration – structure the experience of illness and medical intervention? How do different genres, from lyric poetry to the illness memoir, from fiction to medical case studies, construct or challenge dominant narratives of health and disability?

Monday, 2 June 2025 | Utrecht University
The talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by lieks hettinga (Gender Studies), Jaap Verheul (Screen Media) and Mia You (English Literature). The program is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided. 

21 May 2025 | University of Amsterdam
On 21 May, Ukrainian author Andrei Kurkov will give the seventh State of European Literature. He is the celebrated author of many books, such as the bestselling novels Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees. In recent non-fiction books as Diary of an Invasion and Our Daily War, he documents from up close the war in Ukraine. He continues to write for media across Europe and the United States on the history, culture, and current situation in Ukraine.

1 May 2025 | Utrecht University
For this workshop, Montreal-based “transborder poet and translator of poetry and poetics” Erín Moure will lead participants in a discussion on creative and collaborative translation, as well as how her own work develops a ‘biopoetics.’ Participants will also be invited to participate in translation exercises, as well as share their translations for collective feedback. Following the workshop, participants are asked to attend a public reading in the same location (BAK), featuring Moure alongside Dutch poet/translator/editor Frank Keizer.