The Contemporary: Aesthetics and Poetics of the Historical Event

With Guests Na'ama Rokem (U Chicago), Simone Stirner (Harvard),  Lucy Alford (Wake Forest)

Workshop Schedule:

Thursday, March 5, 2026

9:45—10:00        Opening Remarks, Amir Eshel (Comparative Literature, Stanford)
10:00—10:45        Ostap Kin (Slavic Languages and Literatures), “When a Story Became a Threat: The Holocaust and Its Writing in Ukrainian Literature, 1945”
11:00—11:45        Letizia Ghibaudo (French and Italian), “What Remains: Visual-Verbal Strategies in the Aesthetics of Historical Trauma”
12:00—1:00        Lunch Break
1:00—1:45        Ariel Horowitz (Comparative Literature), “Jamaica Kincaid’s 'A Small Place' and the Philosophy of History”
2:00—2:45        Hevin Karakurt (Comparative Literature), “This is a Catastrophe! A Kurdish Poetics of Historiography in Prose and Poetry”
3:00—3:45        Antje Gebhardt (German Studies), “Entangled (Hi)Stories in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s novel 'Ada’s Realm'”
4:00—4:45        Gilad Shiram (German Studies), “’Transforming Birds of Prey into Sudden Angels’: History Transfigured in Zuzanna Ginczanka’s ‘Non omnis moriar’”
5:00—6:15        Round Table: Amir Eshel (Comparative Literature, Stanford), Lucy Alford (English, Wake Forest University), Simone Stirner (Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard)

Friday, March 6, 2026

10:00—10:45        Jordan Virtue (History), “’The Lyre of War’: Black Civil War Memory in Paul Laurence Dunbar”
11:00—11:45        Gary Huertas (Iberian and Latin American Cultures), “Epistemologies of the Trace: Decolonial Memory, Aporias of Truth, and Hybrid Methodologies in post-agreement Colombia”
12:00—1:00        Lunch Break
1:00—1:45        Jon Tadmor (Comparative Literature), “Historicizing the Aesthetic Event: On the Enigmas of Natan Alterman’s 'Joy of the Poor' (1941)”
2:00—2:45        Anne Gross (English), “The Newspaper as Aesthetic Form”
3:00—3:45        Christian Gonzalez Ho (Art and Art History), “Curating Darkness: Isaac Julien and the Politics of Memory”
4:00—4:45        Miri Powell (History), “Has West-Coast Tech Lost the Mandate of Heaven?: Inquiries into a History-in-the-Making”
5:00—6:15        Round Table: Alexander Nemerov (Art and Art History, Stanford), Na’ama Rokem (Comparative Literature, Chicago), Alys George (German Studies, Stanford)