European Literature Night 2019
Amsterdam | 16-17 May 2019
The European Literature Night 2019, on 16 and 17 May will be celebrating the Library, in collaboration with the OBA, the Amsterdam Public Library, which marks its 100th anniversary.
OSL Awards 2019
This year, OSL will reward three of its members with an Award for the following categories: published scholarly book, published article, and PhD thesis manuscript. The Awards are intended to acknowledge original and innovative contributions to the field of literary studies and to highlight the work of talented scholars at the beginning of their careers. […]
Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: New Approaches to World Literature
Amsterdam | 27 June 2019
21st Meeting of the Platform for Postcolonial Readings
The interest scholars such as Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch took in world literature fifteen to twenty years ago has recently been criticized by, for instance, Michael Allan and Aamir Mufti as (too) generalizing and universalizing. These and other critics have started to think about location and multilingualism in order to bypass the globalizing tendencies of earlier scholarship. Already as a field world literature tends to exclude non-Western traditions, canons and languages. Francesca Orsini proposes to speak of “multilingual locals” and “significant geographies” with the aim of pluralising our understanding of world literature and foregrounding the subjectivity and positionality of its actors. After all, many of the literary works that travel beyond their original contexts of production never become visible in a truly global way, but circulate in particular geographies and across specific languages.
Course – Computational Literary Studies
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.
OSL Seminar – Contemporary Debates in Life Writing
Amsterdam, March-April 2019, 5 EC
This course focuses on contemporary debates in life writing as a newly emerging field across disciplines. Life writing is an umbrella term for a wide range of writings about one’s own or someone else’s life, such as biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, bio-fiction and travel writing. In the course we will explore various life stories of men and women in the 20th and 21st centuries, who each had their own unique set of life experiences, beliefs and perceptions. This will help gain a richer understanding of how individuals move through, interact with, and are affected by the major events of their time — and how their lives are narrated, either by themselves or by others.
Ravenstein Seminar (Winter School 2019) – Memory Studies and Materiality (preliminary programme available)
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.
Message from the Groningen team
Wutsje / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0As previously announced, on 1 January 2019 OSL officially moved from the University of Amsterdam to the University of Groningen. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to the UvA team – Director Henk van der Liet, Programme Director Stephan Besser, Managing Director Paul Koopman, and Office Manager Chantal Olijerhoek – for their amazing […]
Ravenstein Keynote Lecture Professor Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)
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.
Hermes Summer School “Passages: Metaphors, Narratives and Concepts” (May 19-24, Rauischholzhausen/Giessen)
The 2019 Hermes Summer School for doctoral students will be organized by the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture Gießen at Rauischholzhausen Castle in Germany on May 19-24. The topic of this year’s seminar will be ‘Passages. Metaphors, Narratives, and Concepts’. The Hermes Summer School is organized each year by a member of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies, a collaboration of OSL ten doctoral schools in Belgium, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and the US. All OSL PhD candidates are invited to submit proposals to the current and incoming OSL Programme directors Stephan Besser (S.Besser@uva.nl) and Alberto Godioli (A.Godioli@rug.nl) by January 27, 24:00.
The OSL Award winners 2018
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 […]