Events and Activities

Activities

• Comparative Methods Symposium: Worlds, Institutions, Disciplines, 25 June 2025 
  Northeastern University London / Online, 25 June 2025  The Comparative Methods Lab is excited to announce our inaugural symposium on the theme of “Worlds, Institutions, Disciplines,” taking place at Northeastern University London and online on 25 June 2025. At a time when economic and political pressures are forcing large-scale reorganizations of university infrastructures and new…
• Comparative Methods Seminar — Spring 2025
  In Spring 2025, the Comparative Methods Labs hosted a seminar series on the theme of Comparative Methods, featuring the following sessions:…
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  Lecture by Jacob McGuinn – Celan’s Worldlessness: World Literature and World Closure – National Taiwan University, December 2024
  Jacob presented research on Paul Celan and world literature at the National Taiwan University Foreign Literatures lecture series in December 2024. Abstract The concept of ‘world’ in world literature has been variously reconstructed, in terms of scale and scope, but also in terms of its historical content. Understood as the global space of literary production…

Reading Group

Our regular reading group sessions explore the work of an author or theorist deemed particularly significant for the study of world literature, media, and culture. This typically takes the form of reading an important book of literary theory or philosophy over the course of several weeks.

Past sessions include:

• Summer 2025: G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
• Spring 2025: Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971)
• Autumn 2024: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)
• Spring 2024: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983)
• Autumn 2023: Reading Series: Contemporary Directions in Comparative Literature