Autumn 2026 Programme

16.09	Bring a Problem, Present a Text. In this session, participants are encouraged to present a textual, methodological, or other research-related “problem” that they are wrestling with in order to receive input and advice from the group.
30.09	Guided reading. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Led by Elodie Rogliardo (UNIGE) and Sabrina Sampaio Martins (UNIGE).
14.10	Work-in-progress papers. Jordan Skinner (UNIGE): “Toward a General Theory of Negation: Émile Benveniste’s Unfinished Project” “There is no language without negation”. This is the claim the linguist Émile Benveniste advanced in 1937 at the Collège de France in his course titled “General Theory of Negation”. This claim invites two interpretations. In one reading, Benveniste is making an empirical claim: every language, however ancient or singular, possesses the means of saying “no”. On the other hand, he is making a more fundamental claim about language itself: the capacity for negation belongs to the conditions of language as such. Every language can “say no”, “affirm that something is not”, “deny”, and “reject”. Without that capacity, there would be no language at all. During the Modern and Contemporary Doctoral Workshop, we will unpack this claim together, reconstructing Benveniste’s unfinished “general theory of negation” from the notebooks in which he first formulated it through his later writings on the Native American language Yuchi and on Freud’s 1925 essay “Negation” [“Die Verneinung”]. We will follow Benveniste’s encounters with Hegel, Spinoza, Bergson, Heidegger, and Lacan, asking what happens when a linguist treats negation both as both a grammatical category and a fundamental operation of human thought. Megan Zeitz (UNIGE), “A Transatlantic Romantic ‘Spirit of the Age?’” In his 1825 collection of character sketches The Spirit of the Age, the English critic William Hazlitt claimed that his time was “an age of talkers, and not of doers”, because he and his contemporaries were “so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences” that “[they] live[d] in retrospect, and doat[ed] on past achievements”, “lost in wonder, at the height” of their own progress. Despite this seeming belief that the spirit of the Romantic age was retrospective and stagnant, Hazlitt also states that the genius of William Wordsworth’s poetry was animated by “the revolutionary movement of [the] age”. A decade later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the leader of the American Transcendentalist movement Ralph Waldo Emerson made similar claims in his 1836 essay Nature, asserting that his and his contemporaries’ “age [was] retrospective”, focused on writing “biographies, histories, and criticism”, and consequently advocated for the creation of “a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition”, which would induce a “correspondent revolution in things” that would “attend the influx of the spirit” of the “new lands, new men, new thoughts” of the United States of America. Using these apparent similarities as a starting point, the question that will drive Megan Zeitz’s presentation is: might there be a transatlantic spirit of the age expressed in both British Romantic and American Transcendentalist environmental writings? Megan will attempt to provide the beginning of an answer by observing passages from Mary and Percy Shelley’s travelogue History of a Six Week’s Tour (1817), William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1835), Margaret Fuller’s travelogue Summer on the Lakes (1844), and Henry David Thoreau’s memoir-essay-manifesto Walden (1854). Megan’s talk will explore the intertextuality of these texts, the types of aesthetic attunement constructed in them, and what political ideologies might be inferred from them.
28.10	“Lines of Error”. Dr Lara Choksey, UCL. Hilary Mantel described the writer of history as “a walking anachronism, a displaced person”. This workshop asks what these wanderings and displacements might do to and for novelistic form. It takes its title from a mistranslation of Fernand Deligny’s lignes d’erres, “wander lines”, which he used to describe the paths traced by autistic children as they move through a landscape. To explore these possibilities, Lara Choksey will discuss an ongoing writing project set in and around Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital during Frantz Fanon’s time there as an intern in the early 1950s, before his departure for Algeria and his involvement in the Algerian War of Independence.
18.11	The Question of Living. In this session, Florence Schnebelen (Maîtresse de conférences en littérature comparée, Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France) and Patrick Jones (UNIGE) will dialogue around the following questions: What can literature teach us about the activity of leading a life? How does literature shape our conceptions of a good or authentically lived life? They will discuss the existential themes of their recent monographs (Le Réel et l’Absolu and Henry James and the Question of Living) and will also speak about the comparative methods they use to put literature and philosophy in meaningful dialogue with one another.
02.12	Writing Workshop. In this practical session doctoral students will have the opportunity to present and receive friendly and constructive feedback on a piece of writing they are currently working on. Information about how to participate in the writing workshop will be communicated by the mailing list.
09.12	“When Words Meet Music: Notes on Translation, Collaboration, and Diverse Audiences”. Tsitsi Jaji (Duke University). This workshop will provide doctoral students in English from across CUSO universities the opportunity to think through their approaches to bridging literary studies and musicology with an internationally recognized expert in the field, Prof. Tsitsi Jaji. The workshop will include short interventions by CUSO doctoral students whose research addresses the intersections of music and literature. Following student presentations, the workshop will move on to a “report from the field” by Prof. Jaji, ranging from her archival research to questions of transdisciplinary rigor to notes on creative collaborations with poets and composers/performers. It will proceed to a shared discussion about the challenges current graduate students are encountering, and a broader vision that will shape our future work as pedagogues, researchers, and members of both scholarly and public collectivities. More information about this workshop can be found on the CUSO website. Please note that this workshop will not take place in PHIL 204. Details of the alternative location will be communicated via the mailing list.