Online | 22 October 2020
The Covid-19 crisis has been a disruptive force that has accelerated changes and transformations already present in our societies before the start of the pandemic. With regard to education, the digital transformation — with its quick transition from traditional face-to-face teaching to remote and online learning — has impacted how we organize teaching in our institutions, and forced us to re-think the very foundations of our pedagogies.

Mainz, Germany | 28 June – 23 July 2021 | The program will move online if necessary

Since 2019, OSL is a member of the Institute for World Literature (IWL). The IWL is directed by David Damrosch (Harvard), and has several affiliated institutions all over the world; OSL is the only member institution for the Netherlands.

Every summer, IWL organizes a four-week program at one of its associated venues, featuring an outstanding line-up of leading scholars in comparative literature. In 2021, the IWL program is scheduled to take place in Mainz, from June 28th to July 23rd, although it will move online if necessary. Affiliated institutions have guaranteed places for two participants every year, who will also benefit from a 50% discount on tuition fees.

OSL regrets to announce that the Research Day will not take place in 2020. The OSL Research Day normally serves as the official opening of our academic programme, and provides a valuable platform for dialogue and research collaborations between literary scholars within and beyond the Netherlands. However, the situation of uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has made it quite difficult to plan physical events in Fall 2020; and since an online Research Day would defeat the very purpose of the event, this seemed like the safest decision at this stage. On a brighter note, both our seed money grant and the OSL Awards will be normally assigned this year; please find more information below.

Online 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.