Graduate Student Colloquia

Vicente Huidobro’s Creacionista Poetics and the Translation of Surrealist Automatic Poetry

This presentation compares two multilingual anthologies to show how linguistic conflict—central to postcolonial and decolonial translation theory—is either suppressed or foregrounded, revealing how context shapes radical translation practices beyond metropolitan literary norms.

Building on Trouillot’s insight that “power begins at the source,” this presentation examines how diasporic archives in the post-1970 Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean mediate historical power by questioning both their physical location and their sociopolitical role within transnational Caribbean communities.

Morrison’s Beloved and García Márquez’s Del amor y otros demonios reveal how wounded black love challenges colonial rationality and redefines healing, identity, and subjectivity from the underside of modernity.

This colloquia will focus on the relationship between how López Nieves uses the historical archives to tell his story of the abuse inherent in an incestuous relationship and the sadism of Inquisitorial torture and how these relate to the violence of the Caribbean colonial past and the continued violations of the neo-colonial present. 

This presentation explores how Chekhov used comic form to reflect on the doctor-patient relationship, revealing how humor and narrative structure shaped his literary engagement with illness, care, and embodiment.

This presentation attempts to answer this question by arguing that the Soviet time-image is a latecomer in the history of world cinema that fully manifested itself only after the Cinema books were published

This presentation explores how comparative literature can rethink global modernity by engaging diverse linguistic traditions, using Chinese lyricism to uncover patterns obscured by historical divides and illuminate shared poetic forms across cultures.

This proposal critiques Eurocentric approaches to world literature and suggests three more egalitarian methods: centering non-Western perspectives, examining cross-cultural aesthetic exchanges, and comparing pre-modern poetic systems from East and West.

In this session, Ekrem explores the 2013 Gezi Park protests, examining how a diverse coalition united against authoritarianism and the role of media in shaping the movement within the context of political Islam in secular Turkey.

In this talk, Ben De Witte examines José González Castillo’s banned 1914 play Los invertidos and its engagement with sexuality, modern drama, and the trope of decadence.

Vaughn Anderson will argue that the exchange of silence between the poetic tributes of Octavio Paz and John Cage provides a productive point of departure for reevaluating each other's work and the wider mid-century phenomenon of "silent" art.

Tara Coleman will discuss the documentary mode in the work of Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, focusing on his 2008 film, "$24$ City," and arguing that the tension between documentary form and fictionalized elements is a deliberate poetic device.

Jenny's presentation shows how Virginia Woolf's texts interweave insider and outsider perspectives on English cultural identity to build new modes of affiliation through acts of translation.