The Centre hosts workshops, seminars, conferences and public lectures, including an Annual Lecture, to address matters of interest to comparative literature in its broadest sense.
Below you can find information on our upcoming and past events, including those for the many conferences organised and for our various event series, ranging from Classical Reception (‘Sing in Me, Muse’) to auto/biographical fictions and autofictions (Auto / Bio / Fiction), to Postcolonial Theatre and Dance and the London Beckett Seminar.
Beyond our event series, the programme of events for 2024-25 includes a seminar on Methodologies in Comparative Literature: Printed and Electronic Resources, a Model from Uzbek Comparatists (24 October 2024), a soirée on Olympoetics (12 February 2025), in conjunction with the Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre, to recall and reflect, critically and poetically, on the London Olympics of 2012 and the Paris Olympics of 2024; and conferences on Music to my Ears: Creative Practices in Music and Translation (16 May 2025); on Auto/Bio/Fiction: Epics, Counter-epics and the Shape of a Self (26 June 2025); on Marina Warner (11 July 2025); and on Expressionism and Colonialism (25-26 September 2025), the latter two in collaboration with the Institute of Languages Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Our members belong to a range of networks and societies (for example, LINKS, the London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies; EAM, the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies; MDRN; Out of the Wings, the theatre collective of translators and theatre-makers; and many more), and regularly participate in or organise events with these networks.
All events and activities prioritize diversity and inclusivity, which is central to our ethos.
We pay special attention to the support of graduate students and early-career researchers. In particular, as members of networks such as LINKS, CHASE, Mnemonics, and the Emerging Translators Network, our staff regularly offer graduate and early-career events.
Upcoming events & current event series
Olympoetics: Bodies, Minds, Athletics and Aesthetics (in person – 12 February 2025)
A creative & critical soirée, part of the Sing in Me, Muse: Sing in me, Muse: The Classical, the Critical, and the Creative series.
This event is jointly organised by the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Goldsmiths Writer’s Centre.
The evening will start with a talk on ‘Olympoesis: Revisiting Public Poetry at the 2012 London Games’ by Dr Michael Simpson, Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the CCL, and will be followed by readings and/or performances of creative writing, in poetry or prose.
Click on the event title for more information on the event and for the Call for Creative Writing Contributions.
Event Series:
Auto / Bio / Fiction
Convened by Lucia Boldrini (Goldsmiths), Natasha Bell (Goldsmiths) and Lucia Claudia Fiorella (University of Udine, Italy) and running since Autumn 2022, Auto / Bio / Fiction includes talks, seminars, roundtables, readings, reading groups, book launches and live book reviews.
Our speakers are critics and practitioners. Our aim is to put in dialogue (and possibly in dispute) different interpretations and practices of biofiction, autofiction and neighbouring genres and art forms, and discuss the questions raised by these forms and their critical and textual encounters.
As in previous years, this year’s series too will culminate in a Symposium. This year’s title is Auto / Bio / Fiction: Epics, Counter-epics and the Shape of a Self. More information below, or click on the Symposium’s title to go to the page directly.
For the events in the 2024-25 programme, please click on the title of the series, above.
You can also find out more about the programmes of 2022-23 and 2023-24, and watch the video recordings of past seminars.
Event Series:
Sing in me, Muse: The Classical, the Critical, and the Creative
A Series of talks, workshops, readings, discussions on the social, political and cultural relevance of the classics to our times.
This series of Classical Reception Studies events, running since Autumn 2022 and convened by Isabel Hurst and Lucia Boldrini, will bring together scholars and students from a variety of disciplines with creative writers and other artists, to examine how the literary and material cultures of ancient Greece, the Near East and Rome have been adapted and rewritten at later times and other places.
Olympoetics: Bodies, Minds, Athletics and Aesthetics is part of this series (see above for details).
For more details, click on the series title.
You can also look up the programmes for 2022-23 and 2023-24, and watch the video recordings of those seminars.
Seminar Series:
The London Beckett Seminar
The London Beckett Seminar meets eight times a year, and brings together national and international scholars, researchers, postgraduate students and the general public to discuss issues arising from the prose, theatre and poetry of Samuel Beckett that pertain to aspects of literary, philosophical and historical analysis with particular attention to translation studies, performance and practice, digital humanities and visual cultures. Inherently interdisciplinary in approach, the seminar has established a vibrant research network for postgraduate students, early-career researchers, and established academics on a national and international level.
for the 2024-25 programme, please click on the series title. You can also find to more about the previous years’ programmes:
‘Body Thoughts’: The CCL Postcolonial Theatre and Dance Series, 2025
Embodied performance arts like dance are central to examining questions of decoloniality, given that bodies marked by enslavement, discrimination or occupation can both express and resist these oppressions. Dance becomes a creative practice, and a form of thinking.
Moreover, if colonial ideologies have historically devalued, even eradicated the cultural practices of their colonized subjects, rhythms and movements can be stored in, and replayed by, the performer’s body. Inherited cultural practices like dance can thus re-enact past histories. Dance becomes a system of learning, storing, producing and transmitting knowledge: ‘body-thoughts’, to borrow the words of Black British choreographer-performers Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende (‘The Future Stared Back at Us for the First Time: Black Holes Revisited’. Contemporary Theatre Review, 31. 1–2 (2021), 197–203).
Since 2022 the Goldsmiths Centre for Comparative Literature has hosted a series of talks on postcolonial performance, and this year’s focus is specifically on dance. We are delighted to welcome academics and performers who will discuss and analyse the theme of postcolonial dance from geographical areas which, while varied, share a common interest in resistance to oppression and/or occupation; the revival of indigenous or inherited practices; and the interrogation of fluid identities in a postcolonial world. These areas are Africa, South Asia, Latin America and Palestine.
All talks are online.
(For information on, and to view recordings of, the previous series:
The CCL Postcolonial Theatre series, May 2023: South Asia and the Diaspora
The CCL Postcolonial Theatre series, May 2022)
Conference:
Music to my Ears: Creative Practices in Music and Translation (16 May 2025)
Translation of music has a long history which spans from the translation of opera libretti to translation within popular and audiovisual cultures, via poetry set to music and musicalized fiction. Due to its complex multimodal and interdisciplinary nature, the translation of music has received little attention within the field of translation studies. Recently, however, an interdisciplinary subfield of “Translation and Music” has been emerging (Desblache 2019: 68; Greenall et al. 2021: 21–22; Rędzioch-Korkuz 2024: 66). This fascinating new area has the potential to “enrich our understanding of what translation might entail, how far its boundaries can be extended and how it relates to other forms of expression” (Susam-Saraeva 2008: 191), when translation is increasingly more at risk of being seen as a mere mechanical process in the age of AI. Seeking to shed more light on how this challenge has been creatively addressed by practitioners across various fields, this conference explores the many forms that the practice of music translation can take. In particular, we are interested in hearing from musicians and music scholars working creatively with music, words, and translation; creative writers specialising in crafting lyrics or narratives for music, and translating music to narratives; translation scholars and translators working on the practice of translating music inter-linguistically or inter-semiotically. By bringing together diverse insights, this conference aims to foster new interdisciplinary collaborations and illuminate the creative aspect of music translation.
For more information and relevant links to the Call for Papers, the programme, etc., click on the event title.
Conference:
Enchanting Wor(l)ds: The Works of Marina Warner (11 July 2025)
Marina Warner’s latest work, Sanctuary: The Shelter of Stories (working title), the publication of which will coincide with our conference, opens with a scene from a film, where a man being chased finds refuge in a cathedral. Marina Warner describes how, as he lifts the giant door knocker, it becomes a hinge between danger and safety, enveloping the suppliant in a protective halo and becoming a portal to the Church’s ancient rite of, and right to, sanctuary. Enchanting Wor(l)ds will examine the myriad ways in which Marina Warner has dedicated her career to analysing how objects, spaces, temporalities, people, worlds and words can become enchanted: how they might be imbued with power, aura, mystery or dread. Deriving from the Old French encantement, enchantment denotes a magical spell. In the account of her parents’ lives, Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021), a pair of brogue shoes purchased by Marina Warner’s English father for her young Italian mother when she first moved to the UK, becomes ‘proof of membership, a swipe card, a badge which gained her entrance to a certain way of life’. Like Cinderella’s glass slippers the brogues are a charmed gift, transforming its wearer….
For more information and relevant links to the Call for Papers, the programme, etc., click on the event title.
Conference:
Auto / Bio / Fiction: Epics, Counter-epics and the Shape of a Self (26 June 2025)
Trying to express a self – one’s own or someone else’s – does seem like an epic project to take on, perhaps even a foolish one, as Don Quijote’s taking on of the epic was. Or does the epic cloak provide a legitimacy to the otherwise singularly inward-looking (for some even narcissistic) project of autofiction, or the somewhat dubious morality of appropriating another’s story in the project of biofiction? Or is the recent boom of autofiction and biofiction simply the latest stage in the long history of the evolution of literary form, both a culmination of and an overcoming of the hegemony of the novel, both an intensification of and a challenge to the individualism of modernity?
Sharing a common philosophical underpinning in the break with self-possessive individualism towards an intersubjective understanding of the self, autofictional and biofictional narratives nevertheless continue to explore the self in its reality and materiality….
For more information on the Symposium, our keynote event with Barbara Carnevali, Rachel Cusk and Josh Cohen, and relevant links to the Call for Papers, the programme, etc., click on the event title.
Conference:
Expressionism and Colonialism (25-26 September 2025)
Working with a broad understanding of Expressionism as a literary movement from around 1910-1925 with some early and late outliers and focusing on the nexus between literary Expressionism and German and European colonialism, the conference provides an opportunity to explore a range of questions, such as, How do Expressionist writings represent, construct, imagine, or respond to colonialism? In what ways have expressionist Exoticism, Primitivism, Africanism and Orientalism been framed by colonialist ideas and practice? What form does the engagement with colonialism take in Expressionist literature – poems, fiction and drama, or larger literary projects such as anthologies and journal issues – and other writings, such as essays, manifestoes, travelogues, autobiographies, translations, letters and diaries? …
For more information and relevant links to CfP, programme, etc., click on the event title.
