University of Amsterdam | 3, 10, 17, 24 April; 15 and 22 May 2019
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.

23-25 January 2019 | Utrecht University | (5 EC)
This Ravenstein Seminar will inquire into the implications of the so-called material turn for memory studies including the new challenge to engage in new ways with work in the field of critical heritage studies. We will explore the complex entanglements of matter and memory, inquiring into the ways in which people remember materially, using things as aides-mémoire, but also how things remember in and for themselves, thing-memory being integral to the life of materials. In part because the material turn is the result of “a different image of thought in which everything has turned” (St. Pierre et al.), the Ravenstein Seminar “Memory Studies and Materiality” also specifically aims to reconnoitre the methodological implications of the material turn in and for memory studies, reflecting on the methods with which we can study the entanglement of memory and materiality and how we can do material memory studies.

24 January 2019 | Utrecht University
How are memories written into material surfaces? How are they retained or erased? Materials vary, depending on their capacity both to be marked by use and to retain the marks that have been made in them. They also respond differently to wear and tear or erosion. Thus, qualities of hardness and softness, solidity and fluidity, all affect the mnemonic capacities of surfaces.

The OSL Award winners of 2018 are Anne-Fleur van de Meer and Alex Rutten. They received their prize during the annual OSL Research Day in Groningen on October 12, 2018. Each year, OSL rewards two of its members with an OSL Award for the publication of an excellent scholarly book and article. The Awards are […]

Utrecht, May-June 2019, 5 EC
When they first encountered novelistic realism, writers all over the world felt it encouraged a new kind of vision: an invitation to write about things that had never been written about in order to make people see those things as for the first time. Yet at the same time realism observes rules of verisimilitude that suggest the new can be understood in terms of the already known. We will examine the meaning realism acquired as it made its way around the world by looking first at two Western texts to suggest the history of realism—novels by Balzac and Updike—and then at six more realist novels from other traditions, that is, from Africa, India, and China.