Category Archives: Events

International Academic Conference – Language Contact in Literature: Findings, Problems and New Directions

Invitations, Events

We invite you to the international academic conference Language Contact in Literature: Findings, Problems and New Directions. We welcome your active participation in the form of conference paper presentations.

Date and venue: 28 – 29 May 2027, Institute of World Literature SAS (Dúbravská cesta 9, Bratislava, Slovakia)
Deadline for abstract submission: 15 January 2027
Selected contributors will be contacted by the end of January 2027.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words along with a short biographical note (100 words) to languagecontactlit@gmail.com.
Call for Papers

Hosted by the Translation and Language Contact in Literature IMPULZ project (SAS, www.languagecontact.sav.sk) and the “Language Contact in Literature: Europe” Research Committee of the ICLA.

Traditional models of national literatures, we increasingly understand, fail to account for the fundamentally global, transnational and multilingual nature of the literary process. Satisfactory alternatives, however, are still lacking. At the same time, the concept of translation is applied to an ever-growing range of literary phenomena. Both tendencies, each in its own way, highlight the pressing need for a precise ontology capable of sustaining an interdisciplinary conversation on how complex linguistic scenarios manifest in literary texts. This conference addresses this need and aims to spark a new dialogue across translation theory, literary multilingualism, translanguaging, world and postcolonial literature, international literary movements and several cognate fields. We look to contact linguistics for a unifying standpoint capable of bringing together the study of works shaped by language contact both at the level of communities (Thomason 2001; Matras 2009) and at the level of the individual mind (Pavlenko 2015). We thus invite contributions that span areas from minor literature, borderland, migrant and postcolonial writing to literary multilingualism, translingualism, and cross-lingual influence. Our goal is to better map the complex, multifaceted linguistic practices and processes that shape global literature, and to develop an approach that adapts language-contact perspectives for the literary context.

Guest lecture – Searching for Eva Bloch: Computational Approaches to Translator Attribution

Invitations, Events

Lucija Mandić
(ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, Institute of World Literature SAS)

4 November 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

 

 

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89321224888?pwd=IvAPrbFdbQME9add5EZIZijqbYQ4is.1
Meeting ID: 893 2122 4888
Passcode: 413130

The lecture is presented as part of the mobility project Translating Central Europe: Milan Kundera’s Oeuvre Across Languages, Borders, and Political Contexts and the IMPULZ project Translation and Cross-Lingual Stylistic Transfer: Towards a Theory of Language Contact in Literature, both supported by the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

In 1990, Milan Kundera’s novel Nesmrtelnost was published in French as L’Immortalité, translated by a certain Eva Bloch. Kundera repeatedly referred to her as a “close friend,” yet Jan Rubeš, another Czech–French translator, said of her: “Who is this Eva Bloch? I, personally, have translated a dozen books from Czech into French and so know most, if not all, the translators working in the field, but I have never heard the name of Eva Bloch.” Searches in library databases and archival catalogues reveal that Eva Bloch appears exclusively in connection with Kundera’s work, raising legitimate doubts about her existence. Continue reading Guest lecture – Searching for Eva Bloch: Computational Approaches to Translator Attribution →

Guest lecture – World Literature Theory as World Literature

Invitations, Events

Jernej Habjan
(Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)

4 November 2026 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86201270716?pwd=TxjPQ5h8d4PvI0yfG61wWDag2XY8K0.1
Meeting ID: 862 0127 0716
Passcode: 927868

The lecture is organized as part of the VEGA Slovak literature in inter-literary and transcultural contexts.

Ever since its first mentions, world literature has been theorised by some of the same figures that are supposed to be theorised as key representatives of world literature, including such obvious candidates as Goethe, Tagore, Gorky, Hesse, Kundera, and Pamuk. Moreover, theorists of world literature have never ceased to draw on the theoretical meditations offered by these writers, thus confirming the impossibility of metalanguage rather than the conceptual availability of world literature. It is hence apt to read theoretical pronouncements on world literature as potential examples of world literature. In this lecture, we will consider not only what theorists of world literature say, but also where and when they say it; not only the truth value of their statements, but also the genre of their utterances. Whether these come from writers or scholars, we will observe the object of their studies while being attentive to their studies as an object. Thus, the history of their mappings of the world will bleed into the history of the world itself. In turn, world literature will appear as that which literary scholars and writers debate when they wish to debate world history. World literature will appear as world-historical literature. Continue reading Guest lecture – World Literature Theory as World Literature →

Presentation of the book Hungarian Literature as World Literature

Events, Invitations

21 October 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

Guests: Zoltán Z. Varga (co-editor) and co-authors Orsolya Rákai, David Szolláth and Jessie Labov (Institute of Literary Studies, ELTE-Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest)

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83419847847?pwd=J5swpGuew9Fft4Q2DKbq2TgId5KhqK.1
Meeting ID: 834 1984 7847
Passcode: 739578

The presentation takes place within the framework of the Bilateral mobility project SAS-HAS 2025-2026 Hungarian and Slovak Literature in the Central European Space 6. – Small Literatures in the Global Literary/Cultural Space.

Hungarian Literature as World Literature provides readers less familiar with the Hungarian national context with new access to local variations on an already familiar comparative or historical problem. Rather than reducing the project of situating Hungarian literature as world literature to a search for causal, mechanical and hierarchical types of influence exerted by world literature on Hungarian literature, or investigating the latter’s sporadic occurrences on the ‘great stage’ of literature in the major languages, the volume offers a more complex and nuanced way to reveal the multimodal relationships they form. Continue reading Presentation of the book Hungarian Literature as World Literature →

Presentation of WLS 2/2026: The Rhetoric of Sincerity in Central and Eastern European Literatures

Invitations, Events

The Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (Antakalnio g. 6, Vilnius), 2nd floor room.
Wednesday, 14 October, 16:00

This issue explores literary representations of sincerity across Central and Eastern Europe from the late 19th century to the present. The articles, dealing with Bulgarian, Czech, Lithuanian, Slovak, Polish, Romanian, and Ukrainian literatures, demonstrate how the public disclosure of private feelings functions as a powerful communicative principle. Moving beyond its common association with contemporary post-postmodern paradigms, they explore sincerity as an unstable, relational, and highly context-dependent category.

The event will also be held online via Zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84675683867?pwd=vCLGlwjhtz9hPOj0xZTIrPeA0ZJ0MY.1
Meeting ID: 846 7568 3867
Passcode: 450549

For more information, visit: https://www.llla.lt/en/post/join-us-for-the-launch-of-the-latest-issue-of-world-literature-studies

Unlearning Monolingualism in the Philologies: Concepts, Methods, Literary Practices

Events, News

Bratislava, 8.-9. October 2026
Conference venue: Malé kongresové centrum SAV, Bratislava

Organized by Marianna Deganutti (Institute of World Literature SAS), Esther Kilchmann (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel), and Dirk Weissmann (Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès) within COST Action MultiLiLiTrans – Literary Multilingualism and Social Transformations in Superdiverse Societies.

The conference brings together scholars of literary multilingualism from fifteen countries to address the continued dominance of monolingual and national paradigms in the philologies and to explore how critical concepts, methods, and multilingual practices can reshape literary studies. A related workshop will focus on developing a multilingual knowledge base for research on literary multilingualism, with particular attention to terminology, comparison across languages, and the challenges of asymmetry and untranslatability.

The conference programme is available on the event website HERE.

Guest lecture – (Un)Usual Education Methods and Child Rebellion in German Literature from Slavonia

Invitations, Events

Stephanie Jug
(Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia)

30 September 2026 (Wednesday) at 11:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84553213152?pwd=eA0cWaUMhsqSAMzbCwAEnMJR2XlbFL.1
Meeting ID: 845 5321 3152
Passcode: 952969

The lecture is organized as part of the APVV Memory, Space and Identity in German-Speaking /Transcultural/ Literature from Modernity to the Present.

Children’s autonomy, defiance and lack of discipline seem like contemporary problems that often afflict not only worried parents but also their immediate environment. However, writers at the end of the 19th century show examples of defiant, independent and, above all, curious children, with a touch of humor and criticism. Moreover, using the example of their little literary heroes, they also somewhat give didactic lessons about how thin the line between discipline and violence can become, and under what conditions a child can develop into a mature person. Continue reading Guest lecture – (Un)Usual Education Methods and Child Rebellion in German Literature from Slavonia →

Guest lecture – Roda Roda’s Strategies of Literarization of (Personal) History

Invitations, Events

Sonja Novak
(Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia)

30 September 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84553213152?pwd=eA0cWaUMhsqSAMzbCwAEnMJR2XlbFL.1
Meeting ID: 845 5321 3152
Passcode: 952969

 

The lecture is organized as part of the APVV Memory, Space and Identity in German-Speaking /Transcultural/ Literature from Modernity to the Present.

Alexander Roda Roda, a Czech-born German-speaking author from Slavonia from the turn of the 19th into 20th century, often employs in his writing the practice of turning his real biographical experiences into highly stylized, satirical, and anecdotal fiction covering the broader multicultural context of the Austro-Hungariian Monarchy. By treating his life as raw material for entertainment, Roda Roda intentionally blurred the lines between individual memory (“personal story”) and the collective reality of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (“history”). Continue reading Guest lecture – Roda Roda’s Strategies of Literarization of (Personal) History →

Guest lecture – Le hasard, la passion et la nécessité: traduire du tchèque et du slovaque en français depuis le XIXe siècle: quelques réflexions

Events, Invitations

Chance, Passion and Necessity: Translating from Czech and Slovak into French since the 19th Century – Some Reflections

Prof. Antoine Marès
(Emeritus Professor, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

16 September 2026 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in French with online simultaneous translation into Slovak via Zoom

Lecture Description in French

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86009569768?pwd=6nx3Hd1GyeFD2NpU5EqHL948diTjZM.1
Meeting ID: 860 0956 9768
Passcode: 649525

The lecture is organized as part of the VEGA project Translation and translating in the history and present of the Slovak cultural space. Transformations of forms, status and functions: texts, personalities, institutions.

Why and how did a historian of international relations come to study translation? The answer to this question must be sought within the broader context of interstate relations in the twentieth century, with a focus on the trajectories of those involved in translation. The lecture aims to propose a typology of translators and to examine their motivations and professional backgrounds: how did Czech, Slovak, or French speakers come to translate from Czech or Slovak into French? What kind of language training did they receive? What ideological frameworks shaped their translations? Particular attention will be devoted to translations into Slovak, approached primarily from a historian’s perspective, with emphasis on the historical context in which these translations were produced and received rather than on their literary dimension.

Antoine Marès is an Emeritus Professor of Central European History at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is the author or editor of some fifty volumes, including Histoire des Tchèques et des Slovaques (History of the Czechs and Slovaks, Tempus, 2005, to be republished in 2026); Edvard Beneš de la gloire à l’abîme. Un drame entre Hitler et Staline (Edvard Beneš: From Glory to the Abyss. A Drama Between Hitler and Stalin, Perrin, 2015); L’onde de choc tchécoslovaque. 1968 en Europe médiane et occidentale (The Czechoslovak Shockwave: 1968 in Central and Western Europe; co-edited with Françoise Mayer and Jacques Rupnik, Institut d’études slaves, 2020). He is currently preparing a history of Czech-to-French translators Le hasard, la passion et la nécessité: traduire du tchèque en français. Une histoire de trajectoires depuis le début du XXe siècle (Chance, Passion and Necessity: Translating from Czech into French. A History of Trajectories since the Beginning of the 20th Century) and a two-volume book Histoire des relations franco-tchécoslovaques (1918 – 1992) (History of Franco-Czechoslovak Relations /1918-1992/).