OSL Seed Money Grant 2025

The OSL seed money grant aims to foster collaboration within and beyond the OSL community. The OSL Board will make € 1000,- available as seed money for the most promising initiative, including for instance: Planning of symposia, workshops and conferences in 2026 or 2027 Publications (e.g. contribution to publishing fees, editing services, etc.) Assistance for […]

Call for Papers: OSL PhD Day

Dear OSL PhDs, We are excited to announce that the upcoming OSL PhD day will take place in Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit, NU 5A57) on Friday, 13 June 2025.  The day’s theme will be “Crossing Borders.” The program will consist of a keynote lecture by Dr Yasemin Yildiz (UCLA) and two panels, each consisting of fifteen-minute […]

OSL Course: Creative Writing – Activist Approaches to Fiction Writing

Àpril – May 2025 | University of Groningen

This course will introduce students to a range of very contemporary flash fiction and short stories while inviting students to develop their own fiction writing practice. Participants will read recent short fiction from the small-press literary scene that does urgently important activist work using a variety of formal strategies and genre engagements, from stories that use epistolary structures, employ translanguaging, or borrow from the conventions of scientific or social media writing to pieces that present fresh takes on speculative, dystopian, and gothic narrative.

OSL Skills Course: Computational Literary Studies

April-May 2025 | University of Amsterdam
The first part of the course explores the new horizons and possibilities as well as the limitations of computational approaches in literary studies. Several computational tools will be demonstrated such as concordance software that can be used for discourse analytical approaches and specialized R-scripts for authorship attribution and stylistic analysis.

OSL/NICA Workshop with Anthony Elliott: Navigating the Digital Revolution: A Practical Guide for Literary Scholars from a Social Theory Perspective 

7 May 2025 | Utrecht University

In this 2 hours workshop, renowned sociologist Anthony Elliott will delve into the intricate relationship between power, subjectivity, and the digital. Drawing on his extensive research in cultural studies and social theory, Elliott will explore how digital transformations can be a powerful tool for both shaping and challenging dominant power structures.

OSL Symposium: Creative-Critical Approaches to the Health Humanities

Date: Friday 9 May 2025 Venue: Perdu, Amsterdam Open to: PhDs and (Re)MA students as well as early-career and established researchers; OSL members have first access. Credits: 1EC, see more information below Registration: VIA THIS LINK (Registration will open on 17 February 2025) Keynote speaker: Hanna Meretoja (Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Turku, Finland) Call […]

PhD Ceremony – Floor Buschenhenke: Entering stories: decoding born-digital writing through keystroke logging

17 January 2025 | University of Amsterdam
On January 17th, 2025, OSL-member Floor Buschenhenke will defend her thesis Entering stories: decoding born-digital writing through keystroke logging. This thesis delves into the intricate dynamics of digital writing processes to explore how eleven Dutch and Flemish fiction writers create their texts.

OSL Sustainable Humanities Lecture: Prof. David Sergeant

The OSL Sustainable Humanities research group invites you to a lecture by David Sergeant.   Date: 12 December 2024, 4-5:30 Location: Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 2-3, room 019 Registration via neh@ru.nl by December 10 For more information, please contact Professor Michael Boyden (michael.boyden@ru.nl) ‘The truth was, most biodiversity was redundant’: human and nonhuman relations during the […]

OSL Symposium ‘Meditations on Malevolence: Exploring Evil in Modern Fiction’

31 January 2025 | Utrecht University
‘Meditations on Malevolence’ is a one-day symposium on the representation of evil in literature, taking place in Utrecht on 31st January 2025. The symposium will feature lectures by two keynote speakers, namely Prof. Maria Boletsi (Leiden University / University of Amsterdam) and Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester Metropolitan University). In addition, there will be two panels with presentations by students and early career scholars.

Farewell lecture Ann Rigney: Protest memory and changing the future

6 December 2024 | Utrecht University

On Friday 6 December, Professor of Comparative Literature Ann Rigney will bid farewell to Utrecht University with her final lecture ‘Protest Memory: How Narrating the Past Can Change the Future’.

Rigney bases her lecture on her recent project Remembering Activism and explores the ways in which protest movements, rarely commemorated in public monuments and often ending in defeat, are nevertheless remembered over time in stories that recall hope in the possibility of change. Trees, and how they are defended, will figure prominently in her talk.