The first complete overview of our academic programme for 2020-2021 is now available! For the activities taking place in Semester 1, registration will open in September (more details will follow soon); if you have any questions, you are welcome to send an email to osl@rug.nl.

NB1: The programme below is not complete; more events may be added in the coming months. NB2: Due to the uncertain situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, we do not know to what extent it will be possible to hold in-person gatherings during the next academic year, especially (but not exclusively) during Semester 1. As indicated below, most of our forthcoming activities are already designed as online events; in the remaining cases, we are keeping in contact with the organizers with a view to minimizing any possible disruption to our training activities.

Online seminar | 6 October, 20 October, 27 October, 3 November, 17 November, 24 November 2020 (15:00 – 17:00)
Although political, sociological, ethnographical or anthropological perspectives from, on and about Africa are frequently examined and discussed, African artistic domains remain relatively underexposed in the Netherlands. This is remarkable, especially when taking into account that African artistic practices are booming – both at home and around the world. In this course, we will problematize a number of assumptions about Africa and explore how contemporary African literature and film invite us to imagine and rethink Africa as part of the world and the location of the future.

Online PhD workshop | Friday 23 October 2020
How do we move from particular examples to more general statements about the literary world? This is what I will be calling the practice of generalization, and it effects all knowledge domains. While other fields have long grappled with this problem, literary studies has yet to engage in sustained discussion surrounding the principles and procedures through which we produce generalized knowledge about the world.

11-12 November 2020
Responding to the recent ‘transnational turn’ in Modernist Studies, as well as the growing field signalled by the establishment of the Feminist Modernist Studies journal in 2018, this workshop will explore the relationship between gender and transnational modernism.

Utrecht | 20-22 January 2021 (the seminar will move online if necessary)
Literature distinguishes itself from other art forms through its use of language. Without language, no literature. At the same time, language also binds groups of speakers together through its everyday use as means of communication and the intimate ties that exist between language and culture. Therefore, language is closely related to notions of (national) belonging: it offers an individual membership of a particular cultural and political collective. Writers contribute to shape these social collectives, even though some writers do not find themselves at home there and have consequently asked probing questions about the cultural politics of their writing, their use of language and the community-constituting effects of their writing. In this winter school, we will explore the various ways in which literature, through its use of language, creates, sustains and contests notions of belonging. We take our keywords – ‘literature’, ‘language’ and ‘belonging’ as invitations to think about what the connection between these keywords mean or could mean.