Comparative Cultural Studies Conference, Budapest, 29-31 August 2018

The comparative studies journals Comparative Literature Studies (Penn State University), Neohelicon (Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary), and Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art (East China Normal University, Shanghai), with support of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, are sponsoring an international conference in Budapest, Hungary, from 29-31 August 2018, on the topic of “Comparative Cultural Studies.” Papers given at the conference will be considered for publication in a special issue of one or more of these journals devoted to this theme. Featured speakers are: Astrid Erll (Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany); Sabine Doran (Penn State University, USA); and Yehong Zhang (Tsinghua University, China).

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS HAS NOW PASSED.

Conference languages: English and French

Registration fee: 70 euros, to be paid in Hungarian currency at the conference venue

Questions? Questions concerning conference logistics, should be directed to Peter Hajdu. Questions on  conference theme, topics, etc., should be directed to Thomas Beebee.

Conference Theme:

In a 2005 special issue of Comparative Literature Studies devoted to the topic of comparative cultural studies, Michael Bérubé mused that “there does not seem to be any reason why cultural studies and comparative literature have had so little to do with one another.” And yet, such was the case.  One reason could be that the former has even less unity than the latter. In France, cultural studies might mean the literary sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau; in Britain the attempt to understand culture as a “structure of feeling”; in North America the study of mechanisms of social inequalities attributed to race, gender, or disability, and so forth. Another reason may be the fact that comparative literature remains largely within the modality of close reading and the valorization of texts as aesthetic objects. In those cases  where cultural studies works primarily with texts, on the other hand, its task is to analyze them as embodying the “social life of subjective forms” at a particular moment of their circulation (Richard Johnson). Just as frequently, however, cultural studies pays scant attention to texts (at least as traditionally conceived) in favor of analyzing  the processes of cultural production or reception.

Is Bérubé’s assessment “still” true? Is the divide still there? Are there scholars who compare cultural phenomena across language areas, and comparatists who use the methodologies of cultural studies? Does the current fragmentation of cultural studies into a seemingly endless variety of “studies” sub-fields (Memory Studies, Border Studies, Biopolitics, Anthropocene Studies, Thing Theory, etc.) advance or hinder the possibilities for comparison?

The organizers of this conference on Comparative Cultural Studies welcome at least three different types of contributions in the form of 20-minute papers:

  1. Research that actually “does the work” of cross-cultural comparison. Examples include: comparing conceptions of “disability,” “race,” or “gender” as these are conceived within different cultures; glocalizations of transnational media; cross-cultural (mis)understanding.
  2. Theories of culture or critiques of theories of culture (e.g. Adorno, Gramsci, Jameson, Lotman, Macherey) with broad application. Examples include: how do cultures remember – and forget?; “minor” or “small” literature?; can Border Theory be applied to any border?
  3. Reviews of the work done in one or more “studies” sub-fields with potential import for various language areas. Examples: current controversies in translation studies; why study the Global South? Frankfurt School – Third Generation.

We also welcome submissions of entire panels, workshops, or roundtables related to the conference theme.

Featured Speakers:

Astrid Erll, Keynote Speaker, is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. She has worked on memories of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, British colonialism in India and the Vietnam war. She is general editor of the book series Media and Cultural Memory (de Gruyter, since 2004), co-editor of A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (with A. Nünning, 2010), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (with A. Rigney, 2009), and author of Memory in Culture (Palgrave 2011)/ Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen (2005, 2nd ed. 2011), an introduction to memory studies. She is part of the editorial board of the journal Memory Studies (SAGE) and the book series Memory Studies (Palgrave).

Sabine Doran, Plenary Speaker, is Associate Professor of German, Penn State. Her work  merges Holocaust Studies with Visual Studies. Her first book, The Culture of Yellow, explored the significance of that color in various contexts of the twentieth century, from Van Gogh’s painted hat to the discriminatory Jewish star.  Her current major project, “Your Wound is Mine”: Stigma Power in Post-Digital Aesthetics, explores the evolving technologies of representing and archiving stigmata (i.e. of wounds and woundings) at the cross-section of aesthetics and politics in the  twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Yehong Zhang, Plenary Speaker, is tenured associate professor and director of the Literature and Cognition Lab in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Beijing. She specializes in cognitive literary studies, cross-cultural empirical literary studies, German literature, and literary theories. She is the author of the book Erzählung, Kognition und Kultur (Narrative, Cognition and Culture) (mentis, 2011) and has been the recipient of a Humboldt Research Fellowship.