Guest lectures and seminars

A discussion of representations of flight, homelessness, border crossing, belonging and identity formation in recent as well as older literature, with an emphasis on literature's connections to the world of politics and ethics.
 

Welcome to a talk by Dr. Monica Pearl (University of Manchester) on rage and generational tensions in recent cultural texts about the AIDS epidemic.

Join President of Moldova Maia Sandu for a discussion on Moldova's perspective on Russia's war against Ukraine and Europe's security.

Migration, superdiversity and conspiracy theories

Emily J. Lordi (Vanderbilt) will give a lecture about the life and work of Whitney Houston in the "Word, Sound and Power" Lecture 2024.

Welcome to a discussion with Ukrainian museum professionals and a screening of the documentary "Izyum. Liberation."

Hemispheric and Global Dialogues on the Transnational American West

Alexander Agadjanian, Alicja Curanović and Pål Kolstø will discuss Russian identity and religion in light of Russia's war in Ukraine.

On the sidelines of Solya’s midterm evaluation: a half-day workshop on mood in Slavic (and Romance and Germanic).

Special guest: Marco Biasio (Univ. Verona), Solya’s evaluator.

Julie Hansen will discuss Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus as examples of translingual literature.

How do we read novels translingually? What strategies and literary techniques characterise multilingual literary texts? How does multilingual literature (re-)shape the canon? What metaphors do bilingual authors use to conceptualise multilingualism?

At this workshop, we will discuss multilingual writing from Eastern Europe from different theoretical and historical perspectives. 

How can we use drawings and graphic narratives to develop and communicate our research? The Border Readings group at ILOS has invited researchers and artists, guest researcher Kari Korolainen and ILOS researcher Fabian Heffermehl, to share with us their thoughts and experiences of using drawing and graphic storytelling to think about their research problems – and thinking with their research materials – in visual and bodily ways. Welcome to this open discussion, if you are interested in exploring these possibilities or already have experiences which you might share.

A conversation with Roma Liberov - director, scriptwriter, and producer.

A guest seminar by Professor Rachel Falconer, University of Lausanne. Can Seamus Heaney’s poetry be understood as environmental, if not environmentalist?

A guest seminar by Dr Kristine Johansen, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Host: Juan Christian Pellicer, ILOS. 

Staff and students are cordiallly invited to a three-paper workshop on the application of digital tools for the analysis of historical English materials. The organiser is grateful to the Anders Jahre Fond for financial support.

Melania Terrazas, senior lecturer at the University of La Rioja, will be giving a lecture on contested boundaries and uncharted entanglements in Evelyn Conlon’s short story collection Moving About the Place (2023)”. In her stories, Conlon creates characters living and setting up relationships in countries in which she has had a longstanding interest: Australia, Japan, Italy, Indonesia, Monaco and South Africa. Terrazas will suggest that Conlon’s stories use transculturality as a method that addresses culture as a dynamic category and debunks ideological dichotomies.

Why We Seek Them Out, and What Their Future Holds. Guest lecture by professor Brenden Rensink.

Comparing Indigenous Refugees in the North American Borderlands: Historical Lessons for Contemporary Crises.

Chomsky, Russian, fake news, Old French. These are all keywords for the GAME ON workshop on June 13th.

Contemporary Russian society does not visibly oppose the invasion of Ukraine. There are no barricades or protesters in the streets, and even the military mobilisation has not triggered an open clash between the public and the authorities. But does this silence mean consent and support for the war?

The conference explores borders and border transgressions in the context of trauma, memory, and counter-culture and aims to highlight the specific relevance of Border Studies for better understanding literature, arts, and everyday culture in repressive, transformative and (post-)war societies.

Welcome to an open talk with PhD candidate Tamta Gelashvili on Georgian and Ukrainian far-right movements.

Stephen Kelly from Queen's University Belfast, will present "The Dead are Always With Us: The Ethics of Writing the Past in the Work of John Berger".