Ravenstein Winter School: ‘Sustainability and Literature’

Ravenstein Winter School: 'Sustainability and Literature’

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.

Hermes Summer School ‘Narrating Degrowth and Sustainability: Cultural Imaginaries and the 4th Industrial Revolution’

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 […]

OSL Academic Programme 2023-2024

The first overview of the OSL academic programme for 2023-2024 is now available! For most of the activities taking place in Semester 1, registration will open in late August or early September 2023 (the exact dates will be announced on the website and in our August newsletter). If you have any questions, you are welcome to send an email to osl@rug.nl.

Public lecture: Jie-Hyun Lim (Sogang University)

29 June 2023 | University of Amsterdam
Jie-Hyun Lim is a South Korean historian, writer and ‘memory activist’. He is Professor of transnational history and Director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Songang University in Seoul. He is the author, most recently, of Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing (Columbia University Press, 2022) and co-editor of Mnemonic Solidarity – Global Interventions (Palgrave MacMillan 2021).

OSL PhD Day 2023: Full Program

After the success of the previous editions in 2021 and 2022, we are excited to announce that the upcoming OSL PhD day will take place on Friday, June 9, 2023. The day’s theme will be “Literary Studies: Tools of the Trade.” The program will consist of a keynote lecture by dr. Inge van de Ven and two panels, each consisting of fifteen-minute presentations in which OSL PhDs will present their work in progress. 

The first panel will focus on methodological tools in literary studies and will include reflections on ways of reading. The second panel will revolve around new and not-so-new conceptual tools that can enrich and expand the literary studies toolset. 

CfP: OSL PhD Day 2023

Dear OSL PhDs,

After the success of the previous editions in 2021 and 2022, we are excited to announce that the upcoming OSL PhD day will take place on Thursday 9 June 2023. The day’s theme will be “Literary Studies: Tools of the Trade.” The program will consist of a keynote lecture (speaker TBA) and two panels, each consisting of three fifteen-minute presentations in which OSL PhDs can present their work in progress. This means that six of you will have the opportunity to present.

Automatic metaphor identification: state-of-the-art, trends and future applications for narrative studies

17 March 2023 | University of Groningen
Lakoff and Johnson, and scholars that followed their line of inquiry, have explained why and how metaphor is not just a rhetoric embellishment but a ubiquitous cognitive device present in everyday language, affecting how we think and act. Thus, metaphor is one of the most complex abstract cognitive devices with which the human mind is equipped and which weaves not only discourses and narratives but also power relations, world-views, behaviors, and affects. In recent years, artificial intelligence has largely surpassed its limits and has enriched and optimized various promising models for language processing, including language models such as ChatGPT.

OSL Skills Course: Computational Literary Studies

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

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 Symposium ‘Lifting the Veil: Science, Superstition, and the Supernatural’

‘Lifting the Veil: Science, Superstition, and the Supernatural’ is a one-day symposium on Gothic interpretations of science and the supernatural, taking place in Amsterdam on 2 February 2023. The symposium will feature lectures by two keynote speakers, namely Dr Eleanor Dobson (University of Birmingham), author of Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt (2022); and Dr Evert Jan van Leeuwen (Leiden University), co-editor of Haunted Europe: Continental Connections in English-Language Gothic Writing, Film and New Media (with M.S. Newton, 2019). In addition, there will be two panels with presentations by students and early career scholars.