Since 2004 each seminar has been followed by a publication edited by the host institution. The volumes collect contributions from guest speakers and the best student papers. All articles have been peer reviewed by two members of the Hermes Consortium. Since 2018 these volumes have been published in the series Comparative Literature and Culture, UCL Press.
Space, Affect Memory. Literary geographies in transnational and transdisciplinary comparison
Edited by Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and Tomás Espino Barrera
Space, Affect, Memory highlights the centrality of space in modern and contemporary culture, both as an object of study and as a concept that underpins research and creative practice. In so doing, this book argues for the necessity of a new approach to space which integrates its affective and memorial dimension.
UCL Press, 2025
Passages. Moving beyond liminality in the study of literature and culture
Edited by Elizabeth Kovach, Jens Kugele, Ansgar Nünning
This volume is an exploration of passages as contexts and processes within which liminal experiences and encounters are situated. It aims to foster a concept-based, interdisciplinary dialogue on how to approach and theorize such a term. Based on the premise that concepts travel through times, contexts and discursive settings, a conceptual approach to passages provides the authors of this volume with the analytical tools to (re-)focus their research questions and create a meaningful exchange across disciplinary, national and linguistic boundaries.
UCL Press, 2022
Context in Literary and Cultural Studies
Edited by Jakob Ladegaard and Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen
Context in Literary and Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary volume that deals with the challenges of studying works of art and literature in their historical context today. The relationship between art works and context has long been a central concern for aesthetic and cultural disciplines, and the question of context has been asked anew in all eras. Developments in contemporary culture and technology, as well as new theoretical and methodological orientations in the humanities, once again prompt us to rethink context in literary and cultural studies.
216 pages. UCL Press, 2019
Mediating Vulnerability. Comparative approaches and questions of genre
Edited by Anneleen Masschelein, Florian Mussgnug and Jennifer Rushworth
Mediating Vulnerability examines vulnerability from a range of connected perspectives. It responds to the vulnerability of species, their extinction but also their transformation. This tension between extreme danger and creativity is played out in literary studies through the pressures the discipline brings to bear on its own categories, particularly those of genre. Extinction and preservation on the one hand, transformation, adaptation and (re)mediation on the other. These two poles inform our comparative and interdisciplinary project. The volume is situated within the particular intercultural and intermedial context of contemporary cultural representation. Vulnerability is explored as a site of potential destruction, human as well as animal, but also as a site of potential openness.
UCL Press, 2021
From Shakespeare to autofiction. Approaches to authorship after Barthes and Foucault
Edited by Martin Procházka
From Shakespeare to Autofiction focuses on salient features of authorship throughout modernity, ranging from transformations of oral tradition and the roles of empirical authors, through collaborative authorship and authorship as ‘cultural capital’, to the shifting roles of authors in recent autofiction and biofiction. In response to Roland Barthes’ ‘removal of the Author’ and its substitution by Michel Foucault’s ‘author function’, different historical forms of modern authorship are approached as ‘multiplicities’ integrated by agency, performativity and intensity in the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Wolfgang Iser, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
UCL Press, 2022
Edited by Heta Pyrhönen and Janna Kantola
"New technologies are changing our reading habits. Laptops, e-readers, tablets and other handheld devices supply new platforms for reading, and we must learn to manage them by scrolling, clicking or tapping. Reading Today places reading in current literary and cultural contexts in order to analyse how these contexts challenge our conceptions of who reads, what reading is, how we read, where we read, and for what purposes – and then responds to the questions this analysis raises. Is our reading experience becoming a ‘flat’ one? And does reading in a media environment favour quick reading?"
210 pages. UCL Press, 2018
Contemporary Developments in Emergent Literatures and the New Europe
Edited by César Domínguez and Manus O'Dwyer
Contemporary Developments in Emergent Literatures and the New Europe seeks to explore changing conceptions of European identity, and the possible ways in which we can speak of a «N/new Europe», in the context of a discussion of the concept of literary emergence. Tracing paths from the West of Ireland to Albania, from London to Mecca and Argentina, the essays collected here reveal a Europe that is porous and multiethnic, a Europe of the mind whose spatial co-ordinates exceed national boundaries and divisions. This volume provokes us to reassess our conceptions of the «Old» Europe, to draw from the new voices we hear in its pages a new landscape, or a palimpsestic overlaying of distinct maps.
291 pages. USC Editoria, 2014
Edited by Sibylle Baumbach, Beatrice Michaels and Ansgar Nünning
The notion of ‘travelling concepts’ has attained a remarkable impact on recent approaches in literary and cultural studies. With the increasing focus on interdisciplinary and international cooperations and exchange, the dynamic travelling of concepts between different disciplines and academic research cultures has become ever more important for the humanities in general and the study of literature and culture in particular. As this book serves to show, these journeys are highly complex and, while being highly productive, they often bear considerable risks.
274 pages. WT Trier, 2012
World Literature and World Culture
Edited by Karen-Margrethe Simonsen and Jacob Stougaard-Nielsen
In a globalised age where people, goods and cultural products transcend the boundaries of geography and temporality as never before, it is only natural that literary and cultural studies turn their attention to Goethe's nineteenth-century notion of aWeltliteratur. Offering their own twenty-first-century perspectives - across generations, nationalities and disciplines, the contributors to this anthology explore the idea of world literature for what it may add of new connections and itineraries to the study of literature and culture today.
283 pages. Aarhus University Press, 2008
Re-Thinking Europe: Literature and (Trans)National Identity
Edited by Nele Bemong, Mirjam Truwant, and Pieter Vermeulen
Re-Thinking Europe sets out to investigate the place of the idea of Europe in literature and comparative literary studies. The essays in this collection turn to the past, in which Europe became synonymous with a tradition of peace and tolerance beyond national borders, and enter into a critical dialogue with the present, in which Europe has increasingly become associated with a history of oppression and violence.
268 pages. Rodopi, 2008
Stories and Portraits of the Self
Edited by Helena Buescu, and João Ferreira Duarte
In contemporary societies privatization has long ceased to be just an economic concept; rather, it must increasingly be made to refer to the ongoing shrinking of the public space under the impact of the representation of individual lives and images, which cuts across all discourses, genres and media to become one of the primary means of production of culture.
332 pages. Rodopi, 2007
Literature and Memory: Theoretical Paradigms, Genres, Functions
Edited by Ansgar Nünning, Marion Gymnich, and Roy Sommer
332 pages. Francke Verlag, 2006
