OSL Academic Programme 2025-2026

The first overview of the OSL academic program for 2025-2026 is now available! For most of the activities taking place in Semester 1, registration will open on September 4th, 2025 (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 otherwise, all events are being planned as onsite.

Semester 1

OSL Research Day ‘Feelings and Flesh: Affect, Health, and the Textual Body’ | Utrecht, 27 October 2025 | Organizers: Prof. Birgit Kaiser, Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi, Dr Femi Eromosele and Dr Adele Bardazzi (Utrecht University). 1 EC
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?

Spinoza lecture with María Dueñas | Groningen, 6 November 2025 | Organizer: Prof. Pablo Valdivia (University of Groningen). 1 EC
More details will be announced in August/September.

Masterclass ‘The Cultural Study of New Orleans’ | Groningen, 7 November 2025 | Main organizers: Prof. Bryan Wagner (UC Berkeley) and Danielle van den Brink (University of Groningen). 1 EC
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. A team of scholars will be engaging with students through a series of interactive sessions that range from geographical and historical narratives of place-making to the literary and musical traditions of New Orleans, ranging from folklore to modernist writings and from jazz to hip-hop. Our programme also prominently features native artists and scholars from New Orleans, who will lend their expertise to these sessions.

Public lecture by Achille Mbembe | Utrecht, 25 November 2025 | Organizer: Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi (Utrecht University), in collaboration with NOG, Network for Environmental Humanities, Pathway to Sustainability and Institutions for Open Society (UU). 1 EC
More details will be announced in August/September.

Seminar ‘Moving Europe: Making a podcast series about narratives of Europe’ | Amsterdam / Leiden, October – December 2025 (Wednesdays) | Organizers: Prof. Dr. Margriet van der Waal (University of Groningen) and Dr. Astrid Van Weyenberg (Leiden University). 5 EC

Seminar ‘Exploring economic history through literature: an interdisciplinary introduction’ | Utrecht, 3 October, 17 October, 31 October, 14 November, 28 November, 12 December, 10:00-13:00 | Organizers: Dr John Tang and Dr Flore Janssen (Utrecht University). 5 EC
Literature is inextricably bound up with money, from the subject matter of the texts to the practices of literary production and distribution. The novel as a form has traditionally been associated with class politics and their underlying economic structures, while the plots of literary works frequently hinge on economic developments, whether at a macro- or microlevel. It is rare, however, for literary analysis to be brought into direct dialogue with economic theory and the history of economics. This course offers an introduction to economic history through literary sources in which each of the three disciplines – comparative literature, history and economics – illuminate and challenge one another to enable complex critical analysis of the source material.
The course will range across global regions, cover historical periods from the pre-modern to the speculative future, and comprise a variety of literary genres from realism to science fiction via poetry, memoir and testimony. In each of these contexts we use economic theory and economic history to enhance understanding of the case studies but also use the case studies in their turn to test the applicability of the theory.

Seminar ‘Queer Textual Politics’ | Amsterdam, 3 November, 10 November, 17 November, 1 December, 8 December, 5 January and 12 January, 14:00-17:00 | Organizer: Dr Jesse van Amelsvoort (University of Amsterdam). 5-6 ECs
In Tendencies, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2005) wrote that “[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. The seminar seeks to promote more inclusive and equitable approaches to queer theory. It not only concerns itself with the queer content of texts and the identity politics thereof but also explores textual politics to unpack aesthetic manoeuvres and gaps in signifying practices. We examine cultural productions across a wide range of cultural-geographic contexts, from the United States to Nigeria, and from the United Kingdom to Russia. The seminar is organised around weekly themes, featuring literary works from canonical European and American texts to contemporary Brazilian and Taiwanese fiction, along with theoretical texts on aesthetics, Marxist theory, poststructuralism, and postcolonial theory. In addition to examining historical accounts of genders and sexualities, this seminar investigates how queer theory informs us about living differently and enables us to seek new ways of being in the world.

Ravenstein winter school ‘Literature and Human Rights’ | The Hague (Leiden University Campus), 21-23 January 2026 | Organizers: Prof. Frans-Willem Korsten (Leiden University), Dr Ted Laros (Open University) and Dr Marileen La Haije (Radboud University). 6 ECs
The confirmed keynote speakers are Prof. Jaco Barnard-Naudé (University of Cape Town), Dr. Brigitte Herremans (Human Rights Centre, Ghent University) and Prof. Peter Schneck (Osnabrück University). More details to be announced in Fall 2025.

Semester 2

Symposium ‘Beyond the Threshold: Liminal Spaces and the Gothic Imagination’ | Utrecht, 5-6 February 2026 | Organizer: Bart Mulderij (University of Groningen). 1-2 ECs
This symposium will focus on the theme of liminality in Gothic and speculative literature and culture. Gothic fiction has long been preoccupied with thresholds: spaces and states of ambiguity, transition, and transformation. From haunted corridors and foggy moors to existential boundaries and unstable subjectivities, liminal spaces unsettle meaning and reveal the tensions between reason and irrationality, the known and the unknowable. The symposium invites scholars to examine how such spaces operate in Gothic, Weird, and Speculative narratives to articulate cultural anxieties, challenge ontological certainties, and embrace the uncanny.

Seminar “Nature Bites Back”: Nonhuman Resistance in the Cultural Imagination | Utrecht, February – June 2026 (Tuesdays) | Organizers: Dr Kári Driscoll (UU) and Dr Kate Huber (TU). 5 ECs
What happens when nature turns against us? This course examines literary and cultural imaginaries of nonhuman resistance—animal uprisings, ecological revenge, viral retaliation—as sites of political, aesthetic, and ethical inquiry. From myths of Gaia’s retribution to pandemic-era memes declaring that “nature is healing,” we explore how narratives of environmental vengeance reflect and reproduce deeply rooted ideas of sin, guilt, and punishment. How do such imaginaries negotiate the boundaries between human and nonhuman agency? And what cultural work do they perform in the face of climate crisis and mass extinction? Drawing on fiction, film, and theory, we situate these motifs in a comparative and historical frame, engaging perspectives from posthumanism, deep ecology, decolonial and Indigenous thought. In the process, we critically examine Western apocalyptic imaginaries and explore alternative worldviews that challenge anthropocentric and eschatological assumptions about the end of the world.

Symposium ‘Literature, Care, and the Ethics of Living in Southwest Asia and North Africa’ | Utrecht, 10 April 2026 | Organizers: Dr Müge Özoğlu and Dr Merve Tabur. 1 EC
The twenty-first century continues to unfold as an era marked by intersecting crises—climate catastrophes, political and economic instability, public health emergencies, wars, and mass displacement. In the context of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), these challenges are deeply felt, not only in material terms but also in the political, emotional, ethical, and relational fabrics of everyday life. We invite contributions to a symposium that approaches the SWANA region not through familiar tropes of crisis but through the quieter, more enduring work of care, vulnerability, and solidarity. Our goal is to ask how different cultural productions, as both reflective and generative forces, might help us reimagine our responsibilities to one another and to the planet we share. The symposium aims to explore deeper understandings of how care—as a critical, creative, and ethical framework—can mediate our engagements with modern-day challenges, particularly through the complex and embodied histories of the SWANA region. Our focus extends beyond human experiences to encompass more-than-human communities and their environments. The symposium will investigate literature’s response to, and influence on, ethical and political practices while recognising care as a contingent and relational operation.

Seminar ‘Contemporary Debates in Life Writing’ | Amsterdam, April – June 2026 (Fridays) | Organizers: Dr Marleen Rensen and Dr Anna Seidl (UvA). 5 ECs
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. Moreover, we examine the narrative strategies employed in life writing within the context of memory discourses, exploring how life writing can serve as a mobilizing force to challenge or reshape perceptions of dominant historical narratives.

Skills course ‘Computational Literary Studies’ | Amsterdam / Online, April – June 2026 (Mondays) | Organizer: Prof. Karina van Dalen-Oskam (UvA). 3-6 ECs
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. The questions to be addressed in the first four sessions of the seminar include: How can different authors be distinguished from each other using computational tools? In which ways do their writing styles exactly differ? What are the options for computer-assisted discourse analysis? What kinds of reasoning and logic play a role when computational tools are applied and what are their epistemological implications? How can we evaluate the results of the new methods and techniques? Each class, a new tool will be introduced and the students will learn the basics of their use hands-on. The second part of the course is optional and more practical. In two workshop-like hands-on meetings students will conduct small research projects of their own. In this way, they will learn to use the computational tools themselves and gain practical experience with their possibilities and limitations. The research projects can be devoted to the cases presented in the first part of the course but also be proposed by the students themselves.