Comics Study Day

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8 Novmeber 2024 | University of Amsterdam
The comics medium has long been employed to communicate with a range of audiences from mainstream entertainment to counter-cultural and educational settings. The topics addressed by comics are equally wide-ranging, from superhero stories to histories of war, and from graphic medicine to activism, to name just a few examples. Comics research, in the meantime, came to encompass not only close-reading of specific texts but also the making of comics as a research method. Through this day-long event, Comics Studies Day invites participants to take stock of all these developments and explore comics as a performative medium.

OSL Awards 2024: Call for Submissions

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The call for the 2024 OSL Awards is now open! Just like last year, the awards consist of five categories: ‘published scholarly book’, ‘published article’, ‘PhD dissertation’, ‘ReMA thesis’ and ‘valorization‘. The Awards are intended to acknowledge original and innovative contributions to the field of literary studies and to highlight the work of talented OSL […]

Ravenstein Winter School: ‘S is for Scholarship: Approaches to Children’s Literature’

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Where and when: Tilburg, 22-24 January 2025 Organizers: Dr Élodie Malanda (Tilburg University), Dr Vera Veldhuizen (University of Groningen) Open to: PhDs and RMA students; OSL members have first access Credits: 6 ECs. NB: Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities. Registration will open 7 October 2024, 9am CET via this […]

OSL Seminar: Queer Textual Politics

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Where and when: Amsterdam | 6 February, 13 February, 20 February, 6 March, 13 March, 20 March and 3 April 2025 (14:00–17:00 CET) Organizer: dr. Jesse van Amelsvoort (University of Amsterdam) Open to: PhDs and ReMA students; OSL members have first access. Credits: 5-6 EC. More details on the assignments will be provided soon. NB: Credits can only […]

CfP ‘Meditations on Malevolence: Exploring Evil in Modern Fiction’

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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.

Spinoza Conference 2024: Ignacio Martínez de Pisón

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© Picture Javier Burbano
14 November 2024 | Leiden University
The Spinoza Lecture is an annual lecture given in Spanish by a prominent personality of Hispanic literature, organized since 2005 by the Cultural Council of the Spanish Embassy in The Hague and the Cervantes Institute in Utrecht. On this occasion, the Conference will take place at the Hague Campus of the University of Leiden, the city where the Dutch philosopher of Sephardic origin died in 1677 and which will host the event for the first time. The Spinoza Lecture 2024 will be given by the Spanish novelist Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, one of the most respected voices of Hispanic prose of our time, considered by many to be the greatest representative of current realist literature in Spanish.

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

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November – December 2024 | University of Groningen and University of Amsterdam
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. However, arrested within such perceptions of new spatio-temporal fluidities of “the contemporary” were the heterogeneous temporalities of decolonization and democratization in societies that had been negotiating the impacts and afterlives of empire and ideological conflicts of the Cold War across the long 20th century.

OSL Seminar: ‘Writing Extinction and the Planetary Turn’

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September – December 2024 | Utrecht University
n this course, we explore this “planetary turn” in fiction and art. We will not only interrogate the affordances of specific forms to postulate futures of hopefulness and resilience in the face of planetary precarity, but also problematize narratives that center Euro-Western histories and experiences or that use deep temporalities to articulate exclusionary settler colonial emergency imaginaries. In addition, we will consider alternative cultural forms that highlight decolonial or other-than-human perspectives.

OSL Academic Program 2024-2025

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The first overview of the OSL academic program for 2024-2025 is now available! For most of the activities taking place in Semester 1, registration will open on September 2nd, 2024 (more details will be shared in our August newsletter). If you have any questions, you are welcome to send an email to osl@rug.nl. NB: Unless stated […]