Worlds of Literature - Competing Notions of the Global

With its first annual conference, "Worlds of Literature — Competing Notions of the Global", the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2020 Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective turns to the question of how competing notions of the global have affected and continue to affect debates about 'world literature' and matters of transnational literary canonization. As the cluster assumes that literature becomes global through its temporal entanglements, its annual conference seeks to reflect and expand upon established theories of world literature by drawing on spatiotemporal networks of literary communities and their interaction with other arts and media. Accordingly, the conference brings together scholars from the humanities and the social sciences to debate and contrast different theoretical and methodological framings of globality, cosmopolitanism, and competing cultural conceptions of mundanity across world history.

Confirmed speakers: Jessica Berman (University of Maryland Baltimore County), Gloria Chicote (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Buenos Aires), Sebastian Conrad (Freie Universität Berlin, EXC 2020), Susanne Frank (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, EXC 2020), Bernhard Huss (Freie Universität Berlin, EXC 2020), Aamir Mufti (UCLA), Jutta Müller-Tamm (Freie Universität Berlin, EXC 2020), Daniel Purdy (Penn State University), Harsha Ram (UC Berkeley), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Universidade de Coimbra), Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin, EXC 2020), Rebecca Walkowitz (Rutgers University), Ban Wang (Stanford University), Chunjie Zhang (UC Davis) 

The conference is co-organised by Chunjie Zhang (UC Davis).