GCLR 2022/2023 Distinguished Vistor: Dr. Ursula K. Heise (UCLA)
The GCLR is pleased to announce our 2022/2023 Distinguished Visitor will be Dr. Ursula K. Heise.
Ursula K. Heise teaches in the Department of English and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature; environmental culture in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan; narrative theory; media theory; literature and science; and science fiction. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010), and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Heise is the Managing Editor of Futures of Comparative Literature: The ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor, with Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann, of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2016). She is editor of the bookseries, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave-Macmillan and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2011.
During her stay at UCSB, Prof. Heise will give a public lecture entitled "Beyond Realism: Narrative and Environmental Crisis" (Thursday, May 4, at 5:00 p.m, in the Wallis Annenberg Conference Room in the HSSB, Room 4315), and she will teach a seminar for graduate students entitled "Multispecies Justice and Narrative" (Friday, May 5, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in the GCLR Conference Room, Phelps 6206-C). Professor Heise also hopes to interact with students and faculty.
Past Visting Scholars
Our 2021/22 Distinguished Visitor was Dr. Emily Apter (NYU).
On Monday, May 23, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. she gave a lecture, titled "Interpreters in Court: Diplomacy, Justice, and Untranslatability in Katie Kitamura's Intimacies" that may be viewed online here.
This talk considered the case of the professional interpreter as, on the one hand, a fixed structure of the international court - a neutral part of the machinery, an interpassive agent of transparency and justice dispensation - and on the other hand, as a subject mired in force-fields of affect, prone to disorientation linguistically and socially. Katie Kitamura’s best-selling novel Intimacies, about a translator involved in the trial of a war criminal at the International Court in the Hague, focuses on how living in the swirl of translated words and worlds unmoors the translator's ethical centeredness. Drawing on her own work as a theorist of the "Untranslatable," Prof. Apter looked at how untranslatabilities operate in the novel; distributing and redirecting agency in the courtroom, contributing overall to the fluidity of the law, and expanding the parameters, between law and literature, of how we define what a language is, especially in its capacity as a system of justice. Please check back soon for a link to the recording of her talk.
There are still a few spots open in Professor Apter's seminar "Towards a Theory of Reparative Translation" (Seminar), taking place on Tuesday, May 24 from 10:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. The seminar focuses on the following concepts:
How do we rethink translation theory in response to the imperatives of racial justice movements? In the wake of debates around reparations and restitution? How can translation repair the damages of cultural violation and appropriation? How does the critic redress what Spivak calls “translation-as-violation? Or traditions of policing and social harming in language? These are some of the questions that we will address in this informal seminar session drawing on specific translation case studies across media.
Our 2020/21 Distinguished Visitor was Dr. Aamir Mufti (UCLA).
On May 10, 2021, at 4 p.m. Aamir Mufti gave a talk in which he discussed how the discourse of world literature—whether it arises in criticism, publishing, or distribution—is at base typically normative in nature, that is, it seeks to bring about the literary world that it claims merely to describe. This paper suggested some ways of thinking about this normative element in connection with “the nomos of the earth,” Carl Schmitt’s concept of the Eurocentric order of the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. It argues that it is not an accident that the projects of literary internationalism that are historically erased in the contemporary revival of world literature discourse—Popular Front social realism or “Bandung” literary humanism—were precisely modes of challenging this Eurocentered ordering of the world.
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Aamir R. Mufti is professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA. He did his PhD work in comparative literature at Columbia with Edward Said. He has been trained in two disciplines, literary studies and anthropology, as well as South Asian, Middle-Eastern, North African, and Jewish studies, and his scholarship reflects this range of disciplinary ways of thinking.
Above all, he is a student of European colonialism, decolonization as a worldwide process, and the culture and politics of the postcolonial world. In this context, the bulk of his work has engaged with the legacies of the British Empire, especially in the Indian subcontinent, but he is also interested in French colonialism in North Africa and in its legacies for the immigration debates in France. How the figure of migrant impacts the project of European unification is one of his main preoccupations at the moment, in a book project called Strangers in Europa. Recently, he has also turned to Palestine as historical experience—the experience of the missing homeland—and its significance for the critical humanities. His writings have been a series of attempts to rethink some fundamental concepts and categories of the Western humanities—the secular, the minor, the cosmopolitan, the exilic, the border, migrant and refugee, the Anglophone, the world—from the perspective of colonized and postcolonial societies and populations. He is a long-time member of the editorial collective of the journal boundary 2 and has edited several of its special collections. He is the author, most recently, of Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Harvard, 2016).
Our 2020/21 Distinguished Visitor was Dr. David Damrosch (Harvard University). On Janurary 26, 2021, at 10:00 a.m. David Damrosch taught a seminar titled "Comparative Literature Between the Nation and the World." One of the texts addressed by Damrosch was a book oriented toward general readers, Around the World in 80 Books (preliminary https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/80books">online version).
Our discipline has always sought to transcend national borders, and the emigres who set the tone for comparative studies in midcentury America were generally happy to look back to Europe (and, less frequently, to Asia), with little attention to the culture of their adoptive country. Today we find ourselves in a country racked at once by rising ethnonationalism and by a global pandemic, forces that are both more local and more global than our traditional scope of comparison of two or three national literatures. In this session, Damrosch discusses some current responses to these crises, and his responses in turn, in scholarship, teaching, and outreach to general readers.
Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, and is the founder of the Institute for World Literature (www.iwl.fas.harvard.edu/">http://www.iwl.fas.harvard.edu/">www.iwl.fas.harvard.edu). He was trained at Yale and then taught at Columbia from 1980 until he moved to Harvard in 2009. He has written widely on issues in comparative and world literature, and is the author of The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), Meetings of the Mind (2000), What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2009). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and of The Longman Anthology of British Literature (4th ed. 2009), editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and of World Literature in Theory (2014), and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009). His work has been translated into an eclectic variety of languages, including Arabic, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.
Our 2020/21 Distinguished Visitor was Dr. Ann Laura Stoler (The New School for Social Research). On December 2, 2020, at 10 a.m. Ann Stoler taught an exclusive seminar titled: “Documentality in Palestine: Thinking Through Archiving as Dissensus."
Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. Stoler has worked for some thirty years on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and ethnography of the archives. She has been a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études, the École Normale Supérieure and Paris 8, Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory, Birzeit University in Ramallah, the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, Irvine’s School of Arts and Literature, and the Bard Prison Initiative. She is the recipient of NEH, Guggenheim, NSF, SSRC, and Fulbright awards, among others.
Her books include Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (1985; 1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002, 2010), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009) and Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016), as well as.the edited volumes Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (with Frederick Cooper, 1997), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (2006), Imperial Formations (with Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue, 2007) and Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013) and Thinking with Balibar (Fordham 2020), edited with Jacques Lezra, and Stathis Gourgourias. Her commitment to joining conceptual and historical research has lead to collaborative work with historians, literary scholars and philosophers, and most recently in the creation of the journal Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, of which she is one of the founding editors.
Other Past Visiting GCLR Scholars have included: Souleymane Bachir Diagne (2018-19); Marina Warner (2017-2018); Christopher Prendergast (2016-2017), Susan Buck-Morss (2015-2016), and Michael Fried (2014-2015).