During the second week of January, NYU hosted the 2020 Winter Institute, a week-long multidisciplinary event held as a collaboration between NYU, Peking University, the University of Tokyo, and the Australian National University. Organized by Xudong Zhang (NYU), Takahiro Nakajima (U Tokyo), and Paul Pickering (ANU) and supported by the International Center for Critical Theory at NYU, this year's theme was "Beyond Identity Politics: Global Challenges and Humanistic Responses"--a topic that was explored through a rich variety of twenty wide-ranging faculty presentations and ten graduate student papers. Overall, nearly fifty participants attended the Institute from New York, Beijing, Tokyo, and Canberra.
The first day of the event featured keynote speeches by Hent de Vries (NYU), Shirley Leitch & Paul Pickering (ANU), and Marcus Gabriel (Univ. of Bonn). Leaders of the delegations also engaged in an opening discussion, moderated by Uli Baer (Director of the NYU Center for the Humanities), to help frame the event, which included remarks by Mark Kenny (ANU) and last year's keynote speaker, Vice President Masashi Haneda of the University of Tokyo. The following days featured some thirty papers, including a special symposium on world literature led by a group of leading writers, translators, and comparatists from Japan. Throughout the week there was a strong showing by members from many parts of the NYU community, including faculty members Catharine Stimpson, Thomas Looser, Nina Cornyetz, Yoon Jeong Oh, Zakir Paul, Avital Ronell, Annmaria Shimabuku, and Sonia Werner; and graduate students Wan-Chun Huang, Alyssa Pu, Honey Watson, and Stefan Tan. Participants also attended from the greater New York metropolitan region, including NYU comp. lit. alum Robyn Creswell (Yale). Additional funding for the Winter Institute came from the generous support of Bob Xu, founder of Zhenfund.
Please refer to the 02/10 Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/49b89377cde5/comp-lit-newsletter-week-of-210 for more info!