29 June 2023 | University of Amsterdam
Jie-Hyun Lim is a South Korean historian, writer and ‘memory activist’. He is Professor of transnational history and Director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Songang University in Seoul. He is the author, most recently, of Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing (Columbia University Press, 2022) and co-editor of Mnemonic Solidarity – Global Interventions (Palgrave MacMillan 2021).

Dear OSL PhDs,

After the success of the previous editions in 2021 and 2022, we are excited to announce that the upcoming OSL PhD day will take place on Thursday 9 June 2023. The day’s theme will be “Literary Studies: Tools of the Trade.” The program will consist of a keynote lecture (speaker TBA) and two panels, each consisting of three fifteen-minute presentations in which OSL PhDs can present their work in progress. This means that six of you will have the opportunity to present.

17 March 2023 | University of Groningen
Lakoff and Johnson, and scholars that followed their line of inquiry, have explained why and how metaphor is not just a rhetoric embellishment but a ubiquitous cognitive device present in everyday language, affecting how we think and act. Thus, metaphor is one of the most complex abstract cognitive devices with which the human mind is equipped and which weaves not only discourses and narratives but also power relations, world-views, behaviors, and affects. In recent years, artificial intelligence has largely surpassed its limits and has enriched and optimized various promising models for language processing, including language models such as ChatGPT.

Scholars working in computational literary studies make use of computer software that helps them to analyze digital textual data. Software can support the exploration of a much larger amount of data in systematic ways than was possible before. 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.

‘Lifting the Veil: Science, Superstition, and the Supernatural’ is a one-day symposium on Gothic interpretations of science and the supernatural, taking place in Amsterdam on 2 February 2023. The symposium will feature lectures by two keynote speakers, namely Dr Eleanor Dobson (University of Birmingham), author of Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt (2022); and Dr Evert Jan van Leeuwen (Leiden University), co-editor of Haunted Europe: Continental Connections in English-Language Gothic Writing, Film and New Media (with M.S. Newton, 2019). In addition, there will be two panels with presentations by students and early career scholars.