Online Summer School | 26-30 July 2021

The last two decades have seen the increase of conflicts of an ethnic, cultural, racial, environmental, religious, political or economic nature around the world. Hence, it is urgent to reflect on the hostilities that have come to be characteristic of our contemporary societies. Of equal relevance is to address the processes of negotiation and peace building that were pursued during this time. These processes have multiplied in various conflictive situations, prompting creative ways of narrating the historical memories of wars and confrontations and fostering spaces prone to dialogue between belligerent actors and their victims. The main questions of the Summer School are based on the hypothesis that the recent peace process in Colombia —as well as new-fashioned cases of negotiation of other internal armed conflicts— represent fertile scenarios to understand or visualize the narratives through which societies confront, explain and process the effects of the conflict from both, a local and a global perspective. The aim of this Summer School is to reflect on these processes of conflict, transition and peace, and on how cultures strive to imagine and build future horizons of peace. The central theme of this edition is cultural narratives of conflict, post-conflict and reconciliation.

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.

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.