6 June 2018 | Universiteit Utrecht
African literature (novels, plays, and poetry written in English) was largely the creation of young men who came of age and began their writing careers at the same moment that they became citizens of newly independent nation-states. Just as the novel appeared at midcentury to be the epitome of literature, the modern state was the inevitable setting of all modern politics, but Africans, new to both, could not take either for granted.

‘Kijk nu eens daadwerkelijk naar literaire kwaliteit’ Stereotypen belemmeren eerlijke beoordeling vrouwelijke auteurs Datum: vrijdag 18 mei om 11.00 uur. Locatie: Aula van de UvA, Singel 411, Amsterdam Promotoren: prof. dr. L.W.M. Bod en prof. dr. K.H. van Dalen-Oskam Het literaire werk van vrouwen wordt nog altijd minder literair gevonden dan dat van een man. […]

June 8, RUG – 1 EC
Ever since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Bruno Latour forcefully have called into question the dominance of established modes of critique, there has been debate among literary and cultural scholars on the meaning and orientation of reading and critique. In recent years, Rita Felski’s work in Uses of Literature (2008) and The Limits of Critique (2015) has been at the centre of these discussions. The purpose of this master class is to think about the future of critique, criticism and reading in our own academic work, and to ask how these new avenues of thought and practice might be put to work for societal engagement and valorisation. – This master class aims not only to facilitate interaction and dialogue among the participants, but also explicitly encourages them to actively search for new ways of reading and criticism and include them in their research projects.

18-22 June 2018 | Rome
Thinking about vulnerability often raises questions which are political and ethical in nature: who or what is vulnerable? What reactions does vulnerability provoke? What forms of responsibility does vulnerability entail? Vulnerability has been argued to be a defining characteristic of the human condition. The American philosopher Daniel Callahan writes that “we are as human beings intrinsically vulnerable. We are vulnerable to time and nature […] and we are vulnerable to each other”. Yet these vulnerabilities are shared not only by humans but also, for instance, by non-human animals. Indeed, the recognition that animals, too, are vulnerable is a key argument in animal rights. To recall a much-quoted phrase from Jeremy Bentham: “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”