A meeting with Irene Solà

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Friday 7 November 2025 | 16:00–17:00 | University of Amsterdam
On 7 November 2025, the award-winning Catalan writer Irene Solà will speak with students and staff about her work, including her latest novel I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness. With this work, she won this year’s European Literature Prize; according to the jury, this novel “celebrates and damns all of life … Solà’s language is wild, the composition measured, her women simply unforgettable.” I Gave You Eye  and You Looked Toward Darkness tells the story of Bernedeta, but also of the place legends, folktales, and myths occupy in our society.

Arts of Memory and Mourning in the Anthropocene: Masterclass and Lecture with Prof. Stef Craps

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Professor Stef Craps (Ghent University) will visit Radboud University Nijmegen on 4–5 November 2025 to give a masterclass for PhD and ReMA students and a public lecture followed by a roundtable. The events will explore how cultural works engage with ecological forgetting, grief, and guilt.   Masterclass for PhD and ReMA Students ‘Confronting Amnesia, Practising […]

Fragments, Clues, and Surprises in Literary Biographies: Writing Cavafy’s Life

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Date: 28 November 2025 Time: 17:00-18:30 Venue: SPUI25 Podium, Amsterdam (Spui 25, 1012 WX Amsterdam) Main organizer: Prof. Dr. Maria Boletsi (Leiden University & University of Amsterdam) Speakers: Prof. Dr. Gregory Jusdanis (Ohio State University), dr. Koen Hilberdink (biographer)   ECTS: 1 EC   Event description: Literary biographies have long fascinated the public, as they have offered […]

International Blended Seminar: The Shoah in European Memory

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October – December 2025 | Radboud University
This international seminar offers a unique opportunity for students from multiple European countries to collaborate in an international and interdisciplinary environment. From October to December, the course will feature weekly online evening sessions, providing spaces for the exchange of ideas, reflection on texts, and analysis of primary sources in small international groups. Students will prepare two presentations throughout the semester, which will be shared and discussed in a plenary session. The online course will be followed by a two-day workshop in the spring semester, with participation optional.

CfP OSL Research Day 2025 ‘Feelings and Flesh: Affect, Health, and the Textual Body’

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27 October 2025 | Utrecht University
While serving as a meeting occasion for the entire OSL community, the 2025 OSL Research Day will take the shape of a symposium focusing on a specific theme – namely the intersections of Medical Humanities and Affect Theory, examining how literature and cultural narratives mediate experiences of illness, embodiment, and care. The symposium asks: how do literary and artistic representations of illness shape the way we suffer, heal, and endure? How does affect – pain, anxiety, hope, frustration – structure the experience of illness and medical intervention? How do different genres, from lyric poetry to the illness memoir, from fiction to medical case studies, construct or challenge dominant narratives of health and disability?

OSL / NICA Masterclass: The Cultural Study of New Orleans

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7 November 2025 | University of Groningen
This masterclass, organized by Bryan Wagner (UC Berkeley) and Danielle van den Brink (RUG), brings together scholars and artists from the US and Europe through the UC Berkeley and NEH-funded initiative titled ‘An Open Classroom on New Orleans Culture’. Using the materials from this collaborative project, we will bring an expansive and diverse study of the cultural narratives of New Orleans to Groningen.

OSL Seminar: Moving Europe: Making a podcast series about narratives of Europe

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February – April | Leiden University / University of Amsterdam
In this workshop, we will investigate how literature is able to reflect, talk back, deconstruct and challenge different narratives of Europe that circulate in the European public sphere. Narratives, for example, that teleologically construct Europe as having a clear historical origin; that rewrite European history to serve a specific political agenda; that function as bordering spaces of in- and exclusion; that imagine Europeans as a homogeneous group; or that conceive of Europe as a social constitution of overlapping and potentially conflicting identities.