OSL Seminar: Contemporary Debates in Life Writing

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.

OSL Schrijfcursus voor geesteswetenschappers: Framen, schrappen en herschrijven

Valorisatie wordt in de wetenschap steeds belangrijker. En dan gaat het er niet alleen over dat je onderzoek aansluiting vindt bij maatschappelijke thema’s, maar ook dat je aan het brede publiek duidelijk kunt maken waar het over gaat en wat er interessant aan is. In deze korte, intensieve schrijfcursus leer je in verschillende tekstgenres je onderzoek te presenteren. Hoe kun je in een opiniërende column de aansluiting zoeken bij de actualiteit? Welke offers moet je (niet) brengen wanneer je in de media komt of een boek schrijft voor een publieksuitgeverij? Hoe kun je je onderzoek ‘framen’? De cursus bestaat uit schrijfoefeningen en discussies.

OSL Seminar ‘Queer Textual Politics’

In Tendencies, Sedgwick (2005) wrote, “[q]ueer is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means across—it comes from the Indo-European root -twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart” (p. viii). This seminar explores literature across different cultures, times, and spaces, emphasising Sedgwick’s concept of ‘across-ness’. It introduces foundational texts and theories related to gender and sexuality and provides new and critical perspectives on queer scholarship and activism. We aim to shed light on diverse and complex perspectives, particularly of the Global South.

Online lecture by Prof. Marco Caracciolo: ‘Short Forms and Uncertain Times in Climate Change Fiction’

On December 12th, Prof. Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University) will give a hybrid lecture titled ‘Short Forms and Uncertain Times in Climate Change Fiction,’ as part of a conference on short fiction taking place at the University of Pisa. Prof. Caracciolo’s talk and the ensuing Q&A will be in English, and will be streamed online for OSL students; a Google Meet link will be shared with all registered participants closer to the date of the event.

Book presentation: “Remembering Transitions” by Ksenia Robbe & Pablo Valdivia 

Book presentation: "Remembering Transitions" by Ksenia Robbe & Pablo Valdivia 

21 November 2023 | University of Groningen – Jantina Tammeszaal
This volume offers critical perspectives on memories of political and socioeconomic ‘transitions’ that took place between the 1970s and 1990s across the globe and that inaugurated the end of the Cold War. The essays respond to a wealth of recent works of literature, film, theatre, and other media in different languages that rethink the transformations of those decades in light of present-day crises.

Conference Urban Lives: Amsterdam Diaries and Other Stories of the Self 

Conference Urban Lives: Amsterdam Diaries and Other Stories of the Self 

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.

OSL Seminar: ‘Forms of Postcolonial and Postsocialist Time: Eternal Presents and Resurfacing Futures’ 

‘Forms of Postcolonial and Postsocialist Time: Eternal Presents and Resurfacing Futures’

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.

International Blended Seminar: ‘War in European Memory’

International Blended Learning Seminar: War in European Memory

16 October – 15 December 2023 | Online + onsite workshop
This international MA seminar with participants from Lucerne, Paris, Cologne, Berlin,
Nijmegen, and Warsaw focuses on the analysis of practices and narratives of memory in
Europe with regard to war. The construction, public usage – politics of history –
contestation, and transformation of memory of wars over time will be approached by fusing
concepts of memory studies and public history, focusing on different agents in the public
sphere, especially museums, commemoration sites, monuments, art, and the media (including
social media).