COLT MA Graduate Alumni News: Nicola Mazzotti D'23 CfP G CfP Graduate Conference "EU Literature? Institution-Imagination-Inheritance" (30.-31. October 2026, Yale University)
The "EU Literature? Institution-Imagination-Inheritance" graduate conference is an in-person event at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It explores the European Union and Europe as a geographical and political idea through the lenses of culture, politics, and aesthetic.
The conference asks how the history of EU institutions and European cooperation enter the literary realm of novels, dramas, film, and poetry as formal/narrative forces. Taking “EU literature”––a hitherto unspecified entity––as our point of departure, we are interested in questions of circulation (of bodies, books, ideas), centrality and (semi-)peripherality, as well as canonicity and memory. We ask in which ways literary, political, and legal ideas of Europe translate into institutional and political frameworks and vice versa. Apart from centering the institution, we invite presentations that critically decenter Europe from its margins and/or write its conception from a global perspective.
The graduate conference at Yale University will address the EU as an institution and Europe as both geographical continent and political idea from the standpoint of literature and culture. We wager that artistic artifacts are privileged realms in which a reflection about contemporary issues in politics and society is conducted aesthetically and imaginatively. Literature and culture thus serve both as seismographs of present issues, conflicts, and developments as well as experimental labs for ideas, imaginations, and utopian thought. We are here thinking of the way that Yoko Tawada approaches Europe in Wo Europa anfängt (1991), Robert Menasse inquires into foundational myths of the EU in Die Hauptstadt (2017), or Federico Italiano and Jan Wagner let Europe speak polyglottaly in Grand Tour (2019). Which histories and intellectual traditions prefigure the EU today?