Here is a selection of studies published by current and former members of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory in 2025:

Zaal Andronikashvili, “Born of the Earth: Autochthony in the Colonial and Decolonial Struggles of the Caucasus,” in Discourses in Global Political Theory, ed. Hartmut Behr & Felix Rösch (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), 95–119;

Natalya Bekhta, “Democratic Futures, Utopia, and the Literary Imagination of Contemporary Ukraine,” in Utopia and Democracy, ed. Zsolt Czigányik & Iva Dimovska (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), 213–29;

Vladimir Biti, Perpetrators’ Legacies: Post-imperial Condition in Sebald and McEwan (London: Routledge);

Luciana Villas Boas (co-ed w. Daniel Bonomo et al.), James Joyce e Virginia Woolf: experiências, limites e redefinições do modernismo (= Aletria 35.2);

Marco Caracciolo, “Gamification and the Ambiguities of Digital Play in Contemporary Fiction,” SubStance 54.3: 34–52;

Anne Duprat (co-ed. w. Alison James, Fiona McIntosh-Varjabédian, and Anne-Gaëlle Weber), Le Hasard : littérature, arts, sciences, philosophie (Paris: CNRS 2025);

Davide Giuriato (co.ed. w. Anatol Heller), Insektenpoesie: Ansätze zu einer literarischen Entomologie (Berlin : J. B. Metzler);

Djelal Kadir, Solitude: Apocryphal Posts from Distant Archives (Cambridge: Ethics International P);

Woosung Kang, “Heterotopos of Desert Island,” Kritika Kultura 46: 98–113;

Ulrike Kistner, “‘No One Believes in His Own Death.’ On More and Less Necessary Illusions,” in Sigmund Freud as a Critical Social Theorist, ed. Dustin J. Byrd & Seyed Javad Miri (Leiden: Brill), 350–63;

Karin Kukkonen, “Maximal Selves, Narrative Repression and Impossible Structures: Self-Narrative and the Challenge of Literature,” Topoi 44.5: 1–11;

Mengchen Lang, “Intentionally Signaled Lying or Tenorless Metaphor? Comparing Two Rhetorical Conceptions of Fictionality through Lauren Slater’s Lying,” Poetics Today 46.2: 227–51;

Xiaofan Amy Li, “City of the Anthropocene Surreal: Hong Kong in Hon Lai-chu and Dorothy Tse’s A Dictionary of Twin Cities,” The Journal of Asian Studies 84.4: 1034–54;

Ivana Perica, Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Socialist Central Europe, 1928–1968 (London: Bloomsbury Academic);

Tiphaine Samoyault, “Poésie bilingue,” Critique 936, 29–38;

Robert Stockhammer, “(In)stabile Sprachkonstellationen in Romanen über den deutschen Kolonialismus in Afrika,” in Instabile Translationen, ed. Franziska Jekel-Twittmann & Myriam-Naomi Walburg (Berlin: J. B. Metzler), 157–71;

Susanne Strätling, “Lines of Force: Writing Theory and the Energetic Scripts of Modernism,” in Ecologies of Writing, ed. Urs Büttner & Jacob Haubenreich (London: Bloomsbury Academic), 77–110;

Ábel Tamás: “‘Serenus, You Should Understand’: Lucan’s Intertextual Acrostic at BC 9.600–605,” Hermes 153.2: 191–96;

Galin Tihanov, Literatură mondială, cosmopolitism și exil, trans. Maria Chiorean (Sibiu: Editura Universităţii “Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu);

Stefan Willer, “Einführung: Verhaltenslehren,” in Wissensgeschichte des Verhaltens, ed. Sophia Gräfe & Georg Toepfer (Berlin: De Gruyter), 19–26;

Robert J. C. Young, “Weird Luck,” Textual Practice 39.4: 501–22;

Enrica Zanin, Fiction et vérité : l’éthique du récit de Boccace à Madame de Lafayette (Paris: Droz);

John Zilcosky (co-ed. w. Teresa Valentini and Angela Weiser), Alternative Temporalities: The Emancipatory Power of Narrative (Toronto: U of Toronto P).

Online lecture in the Transnationalism Seminar Series, 29 January 2026, 12.00 CET

Current Committee member Natalya Bekhta (Tampere), Stanisław Krawczyk (Wrocław), Jana-Katharina Mende (Halle), Denys Shatalov (Kryvyi Rih/Berlin) and Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg) have jointly organised an online seminar series on transnationalism. This lecture within the series will take place on 29 January 2026, at 12.00 CET. Join via Zoom (link).

Eneken Laanes will speak about “Transnational Critique of Mass Violence and the Memory of the Environmental Impact of War”:

This seminar will approach the question of transnationalism from the perspective of memory studies, which as a discipline has been greatly challenged in recent years by the renewed wave of wars and mass violence in and around Europe. At the core of the development of memory studies in the 1980s and the 1990s was the memory of the Holocaust and Nazism in Europe. In the course of the transnationalisation of Holocaust memory and the multidirectional remembering of other histories of violence, such as slavery, European colonialism, and Stalinist repression, the transnational imperative of “never again” associated with Holocaust memory was extended to other histories of violence. However, the recent new wave of wars has shown that this imperative has failed. What would a transnational critique of violence look like at this historical moment of new mass violence against civilians?

The second part of the talk will focus on the environmental impact of new wars and mass violence, in particular in Ukraine, and on the ability of cultural and aesthetic media of memory to represent the different scales of environmental destruction. It will also highlight how new imperial wars re-member longer histories of slow imperial and colonial violence and exploitation in the region.

Eneken Laanes is Professor of Comparative Literature and head of the research project “Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational European Literatures” (2025–2029). Laanes’s research interests include transnational memory, contemporary transnational literature, trauma studies, post-socialist memory cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, multilingualism, visual history, and environmental history.

The seminar series is hosted by the research network “Young Network TransEurope” based at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Join Online and at ZfL Berlin

Current Committee member Ivana Perica (Berlin) has co-organised a research workshop on “Literary Politics and Geopolitics” to take place in hybrid mode on 29-30 January 2026.

Details at CAPONEU & contact at caponeu@zfl-berlin.org

PROGRAMME

Thursday, 29 Jan 2026

12.00

• Zrinka Božić (University of Zagreb): Literary Cartography and Critical Geopolitics
• Mark Devenney (University of Brighton): Novel (Without) Borders: A Response to Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth

13.30

• Korbinian Lindel (University of Koblenz): Geopolitics as an Aesthetic Principle – and as a Philological Approach?
• Lisa Katharina Schmitz (Johns Hopkins University): Unlearning Geopolitics: The Language of Global Order and the Potentialities of Literature

15.00

• Charlotte Woodford (University of Cambridge): Mapping German Modernities in Women’s Writings at the Start of the 20th Century
• Benjamin Kohlmann (University of Regensburg): The Novelists’ International vs Geopolitics? A Radical History of the Bildungsroman

16.30

• Natalya Bekhta (Tampere University): The Role of Literature in Absurd Times
• Louis Aubry (New York University): Writing and Unmaking the Geopolitical in Jean Genet’s A Captive In Love (Un captif amoureux)

17.30
Digital Get-together

Friday, 30 Jan 2026

12.00

• Nenad Ivić (University of Zagreb): Globalatinization: A Probe into Contemporary Cultural Style

13.00

• Ekaterina Vassilieva (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): Political Fictionality and the Authorship of Power: Vladislav Surkov between Literature and Geopolitics
• Marina Sivak (Freie Universität Berlin): Mapping the Sublime: Travel Writing and the Geopolitics of the Soviet Pamirs

14.30

• Eliza Rose (University of North Carolina): John Berger’s Red Sketchbook: East-West Dialogism in A Painter of Our Time
• Fanny Wehner (ZfL): Mike Phillips’ A Shadow of Myself – Reading a Post-Cold War Thriller through an Afropean Lens

16.00

• Max Roehl (University of Tübingen): The Power of the Weak. Imperialism and Resistance in Anna Seghers’ Der Führer
• Anna Björk Einarsdóttir (Norwegian University of Science and Technology): Alejo Carpentier’s Novels of Revolution

17.00
Closing

Online lecture in the Transnationalism Seminar Series, 22 January 2026, 12.00 CET

Current Committee member Natalya Bekhta (Tampere), Stanisław Krawczyk (Wrocław), Jana-Katharina Mende (Halle), Denys Shatalov (Kryvyi Rih/Berlin) and Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg) have jointly organised an online seminar series on transnationalism. This lecture within the series will take place on 22 January 2026, at 12.00 CET. Join via Zoom (link).

Jasmina Lukić will speak about “Transnational Turn in Literary Studies”

The lecture explores the outcomes of transnational turn in literary studies looking into different conceptualizations of transnational literature. These developments are inextricably connected to the current debates on world literature and global literature. Hence the lecture will address the specific position of the concept of transnational literature in between the concepts of the national and the world literature. Staring from the early 2000s, it is possible to follow several main lines in thinking about the key features of contemporary transnational literature, the qualities that distinguish this specific body of literary texts and the critical tools required for their interpretation. Throughout the 2000s the concept gradually got more prominence in academia with the focus on the questions of multilingualism and various forms of cross-border experiences. Seyhan Azade sees transnational texts as ‘diasporic narratives’ written in a second language, Mads Thomsen connects transnational with comparative and postcolonial literature, and Paul Jay emphasizes broadness and eclecticism in readings of the contemporary transnationalism. This discussion is not limited to actual experiences of migration. Murizio Ascari exlopres the significance of trancsultural relations, and Rebeca Walkowicz introduces the concept of “born translated” literary texts. The related questions of gender are also highly revenant here. Sandra Ponzanesi focusses on women writers, as well as Susan Friedman, who introduces the concept of transnational feminist literacy as a powerful tool of feminist literary criticism. The range of ideas that these authors bring forward sets a particular theoretical and critical framework for reading contemporary transnational literature.

Jasmina Lukić is Professor with the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna, and the Principal Leader of EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective, a Marie Curie Doctoral Network project (101073012 EUTERPE HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 Project, 2022-269).She has published two monographs and numerous articles and book chapters in literary studies, women’s studies, and Slavic studies.

The seminar series is hosted by the research network “Young Network TransEurope” based at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Committee member Davide Giuriato has co-edited, with Anatol Heller, the volume Insektenpoesie: Ansätze zu einer literarischen Entomologie (Insect Poetry: Contributions to a Literary Entomology). Published by J. B. Metzler, the book introduces literary entomology as an intervention in a time when the so-called great extinction of insects sheds light on the age-old ambivalence between the human species and one of the most diverse classes of animals—insects.

Committee member Enrica Zanin is the author of the book Fiction et vérité : l’éthique du récit de Boccace à Madame de Lafayette (Fiction and Truth: The Ethics of Narrative from Boccaccio to Madame de La Fayette). Published by Droz, the book traces the history of the profound transformation in the relationship between ethics and literature that took place in the interval between Boccaccio’s establishment of the novella and the rise of the novel. Analyzing the evolution of poetics, reading practices, and moral reflection, Fiction et vérité illuminates the historical foundations of the most recent debates on the ethical value of narrative.

Online lecture in the Transnationalism Seminar Series, 20 November 2025, 12.00 CET

Current Committee member Natalya Bekhta (Tampere), Stanisław Krawczyk (Wrocław), Jana-Katharina Mende (Halle), Denys Shatalov (Kryvyi Rih/Berlin) and Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg) have jointly organised an online seminar series on transnationalism. This lecture within the series will take place on 20 November 2025, at 12.00 CET. Join via Zoom (link).

Andrii Portnov will speak about “How to Write a Transnational History of Ukraine”:

What makes a certain historical narrative transnational? How does the aspiration of transnational approach correlate with the postcolonial perspective? Are we about to experience a revival of national history writing? What aspects, what themes of the Ukrainian past could be particularly productive for integrating the Ukrainian studies into the newly defined global history?

Andrii Portnov is a Ukrainian and German historian. He graduated from Dnipro and Warsaw Universities, and after research work in Lviv and Kyiv moved in 2012 to Germany. In 2018-2025 he was a Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina. At the moment he is a Fellow at the Centre of Advanced Study Sofia, Associate Member of the Viadrina Centre of Polish and Ukrainian Studies, and Director of PRISMA UKRAINA Research Network Eastern Europe in Berlin. Prof. Portnov is the author of 10 books, among them the award-winning Dnipro: Entangled History of a European City (2022) and a German-Language Introduction into Ukrainian Studies (2025).

The seminar series is hosted by the research network “Young Network TransEurope” based at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Online lecture in the Transnationalism Seminar Series, 16 October 2025, 20.00 CET

Current Committee member Natalya Bekhta (Tampere), Stanisław Krawczyk (Wrocław), Jana-Katharina Mende (Halle), Denys Shatalov (Kryvyi Rih/Berlin) and Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg) have jointly organised an online seminar series on transnationalism. The first lecture in the series will take place on 16 October 2025, at 20.00 CET. Join via Zoom (link).

Illya Gerasimov (Chicago) will speak about “‘The Postnational Constellation’ 27 Years Later: The Main Research Paradigms and Their Preliminary Results”:

On September 28, 1998, Jürgen Habermas’s Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays was released by Suhrkamp Verlag, registering the arrival of a new social phenomenon: the postnational situation. It did not mean that national solidarity and nationalism had become obsolete, only that they no longer held a monopoly on social organization and likely functioned differently than they had earlier in the twentieth century. Habermas proposed several political forms for accommodating the postnational situation. Over the next 27 years, some of them proved more realistic than others. In parallel, several approaches to postnational analysis were developed and tested in the social sciences and humanities. I will briefly survey these dynamics and discuss the reasons for the persistence of a nation-centric approach even in the attempts to defy nationalist narratives.

Ilya Gerasimov (Candidate of Sciences in History, Kazan University and PhD in History, Rutgers University) is a co-founder and the executive editor of Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space. He has published several books and edited volumes, including A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia: From Russian to Global History (Bloomsbury: vol. 1, 2023; vol. 2, 2024); Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1905–1917 (University of Rochester Press, 2018), Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (Palgrave, 2009), and Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-description in the Russian Empire (Brill, 2009). He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters published in the US, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Italy, Japan, and Canada.

The seminar series is hosted by the research network “Young Network TransEurope” based at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

John Zilcosky, Former and Honorary President of the Committee, has co-edited, with Teresa Valentini and Angela Weiser, the book Alternative Temporalities: The Emancipatory Power of Narrative. Published with University of Toronto Press, this collection of essays reveals how modern literature can help us rethink temporal categories and practices to resist normative time and foster diverse and inclusive temporalities. The book analyzes literary representations of time that challenge dominant temporalities and intersect different disciplines such as gender and sexuality studies, trauma and Indigenous studies, race and identity, and religion. Ultimately, Alternative Temporalities aims to create new theories as well as practices that may foster more diverse and inclusive ways of perceiving and embodying time.

 

Djelal Kadir, ICLA Theory Committee Chair, Emeritus has published a new book, Solitude: Apocryphal Posts from Distant Archives (Ethics International Press, UK, 2025).

What is solitude? How does it manifest itself? How is solitude related to writing and reading? How do the core values of ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics manifest themselves in the face of solitude, whether in mythological time, in history, or in our own era of telecommunications and instant connectivity? This volume explores these questions and, by way of demonstration, dramatizes critical predicaments of solitude through thirty-nine letters.

The letters in this collection, ranging from mythological and epic antiquity through the twentieth century, are based on thorough scholarly research and written through the voices of mythical, literary, religious, scientific, and historical figures as the archival and documentary record allows us to understand them in their respective crises of extreme solitude. The letters aim to capture the perennial attempts to deal with the paradoxes of solitude as timeless, universal human condition, a condition most common, yet one that must be experienced alone. Each letter is introduced with an explanatory context—philological in the case of mythological figures, and historical when writers from the annals of history are purported to be writing.

This unusual and distinctive meditation on the pervasive phenomenon of solitude will resonate productively in the study of philosophy, literature, history, and the arts and humanities in general, as well as with readers who have considered or experienced solitude.