University of Amsterdam, 26 – 28 October 2023
In October 2025, Amsterdam will celebrate its 750th anniversary. In light of this upcoming celebration, two of the city’s institutes of higher education, the University of Amsterdam and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, are inviting academics, artists, and others to share their research and knowledge on one particular topic: Amsterdam diaries and other stories of the self.

Groningen & Amsterdam, November – December 2023.
This course addresses the ways in which literature and art, in their generic capacity for multi-perspective representation, reimagine place and agency within the eternal present inaugurated by the end of the Cold War at the turn of the 1990s. This global discourse of contemporaneity was meant to deconstruct the linear progressive time of modernity that dominated the 20th century.

17-19 January 2024 | University of Amsterdam
“Sustainability” is one of the central concepts of our age. While the term is so ubiquitous in virtually all areas of life – a Google search yields close to three and a half billion hits for the term, more than “freedom” or “democracy” – its rise in dominance is a fairly recent phenomenon. The pervasiveness of sustainability discourse suggests that we are now living through a major socio-economic transformation, comparable to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. But the concept’s popularity also raises many questions and concerns about the who and the what of sustainability.

Utrecht, 10-14 June 2024 | Summer School of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies Description Cultural Narratives are symbolic matrixes in the making that orientate behavior, world-views, affects, social engineering, and practices (Kuipers 2019; Valdivia 2017, 2019). Literature and cultural symbolic products (fiction, poetry, music, transmedia, theater, amongst others) are privileged sources of […]