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

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

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Meeting ID: 845 5321 3152
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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 →

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

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

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Meeting ID: 845 5321 3152
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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 →

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

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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/).

Anatolij V. Kharkhurin
(independent scholar)

24 June 2026 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in English and Russian

The lecture is organized within the framework of the IMPULZ grant Translation and cross-lingual stylistic transfer: Towards a theory of language contact in literature.

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Meeting ID: 869 0256 5703
Passcode: 756110

This lecture examines literary creativity through the lens of plurilingual and pluricultural experience. Traditional approaches have treated creativity as a cognitive capacity located within the individual mind. This perspective offers limited explanatory power for multilingual literary practice, where meaning emerges across languages and cultural frames. Building on the Plurilingual Creativity Framework, the lecture conceptualizes creativity as a dynamic process shaped by the interaction of cognitive, affective, and reflective pathways. Language contact in literature is approached as a manifestation of this process. Multilingual writing, code-switching, and translation are interpreted as creative strategies that enable expanded meaning-making and identity construction. The talk also addresses methodological challenges in studying creativity in multilingual contexts and outlines implications for literary analysis. By reframing language contact as a creative resource, the lecture offers a theoretically grounded perspective on how plurilingual experience shapes literary expression.

Anatoliy V. Kharkhurin holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the City University of New York, as well as degrees in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from the University of Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focuses on the relationship between multilingualism and creativity, with particular emphasis on plurilingual and pluricultural competence as drivers of creative development. He is the author of the book Multilingualism and Creativity and has published extensively in leading journals on creativity and multilingualism. He is currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new monograph on the Plurilingual Creativity Framework, which advances an integrative model of creativity across cognitive, affective, and reflective domains. He developed the Plurilingual Intercultural Creative Keys (PICK) program, an educational framework designed to foster creative, linguistic, and intercultural competences. In addition to his academic work, he is active as a poet, multimedia artist, and curator.

Mary Orsak
(University of Oxford)

20 May 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS

The lecture is organized as part of the VEGA project Slovak Literature in Inter-Literary and Transcultural Contexts.

This seminar will explore the American poet, essayist, and feminist Adrienne Rich’s seminal work, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience And Institution (1976), which distinguishes between “the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction—and to children; and the institution—which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control” (13). The seminar will examine how effectively Rich’s interrogations of motherhood function in other contexts, particularly in Czech, Slovak, and Russian literature of the 1990s.

Mary Orsak is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on contemporary Czech, Slovak, and Russian literature. She has written two chapters on Milan Kundera in Milan Kundera: Known and Unknown (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Modern Czech Literature: Writing in Times of Political Trauma (Vernon Press, 2025).

You can read M. Orsak’s study published in World Literature Studies 4/2025 HERE.

Arkadiusz Morawiec
(University of Łódź)

13 May 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in English and Polish

The lecture is organized as part of the VEGA project Narrative of history in 21st century hungarian literature in the context of (central) european literature.

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Meeting ID: 832 8995 2867
Passcode: 621542

The lecture examines works of Polish literature that address the theme of Polish (communist) camps operating between 1944 and 1956. These camps are usually referred to as “labor camps”, although they also served for concentration, deportation, and repression. Unlike German and Soviet camps, these remain – for various reasons – on the margins of Polish collective memory. The lecture discusses novels and short stories and refers to the most important reportages, examining them within the broader contexts of history, politics, and ideology.

Arkadiusz Morawiec is a professor at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Łódź and a literary critic. His research interests focus primarily on the history of 20^th and 21^st century Polish literature, in particular literary representations of totalitarianism, genocide (including the Holocaust), concentration and extermination camps. He also explores literature as a medium of memory. He has published nine books, including Literatura w lagrze, lager w literaturze. Fakt – temat – metafora (2009), Polityczne, prywatne, metafizyczne. Szkice o literaturze polskiej ostatnich dziesięcioleci (2014), Literatura polska wobec ludobójstwa (2018), Polish Literature and genocide (2022), and Polish Camp Literature (2025). He has also edited eleven monographs, including: The Literature in/after Concentration and Death Camps (2017), Lager, łagier, obóz – zapis. Obszary (2017), and Zagłada wobec innych ludobójstw (2020).

29 April 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in English

The issue will be presented by its editors, Florencia Ferrante and Igor Tyšš.

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Meeting ID: 822 2207 2909
Passcode: 319860

The event is organized as part of the APVV project Translation and aspects of reception of social science and humanities texts as cultural and literary transfer in the 20th century.

This issue explores translation in the social sciences and humanities as an intellectual intervention that shapes disciplines, cultures, and historical narratives. Moving beyond literary frameworks, the featured articles examine translation across diverse contexts – from religious texts in 18th-century Italy, publications in Ukraine in the 1920s–1930s, American philosophy in Slovakia before 1989, to post-Soviet Estonia and the international spread of Maoism, Russian Formalism, and Latin American thought. Together, they highlight the critical impact of paratexts, terminology, censorship, and ideology on the cross-cultural dynamics of knowledge production.

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

Florencia Ferrante
(University of Genoa)

29 April 2026 (Wednesday) at 13:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

The lecture is organized as part of the APVV project Translation and aspects of reception of social science and humanities texts as cultural and literary transfer in the 20th century.

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Meeting ID: 860 9623 0428
Passcode: 381024

In recent years, translation scholars have developed further awareness of the different theoretical and methodological issues that any historical account entails. This “historiographical turn” in translation studies helped raise new questions about the relationship that a history of translation is supposed to establish with general history and with other disciplinary histories as well — such as book history, literary and intellectual history, the history of philosophy, science, religion. At the same time, translation historians have adopted diverse historiographical models in an effort to identify the best suited approaches, concepts and tools to carry out their research.

The aim of this lecture is, first, to observe and discuss some of the main working metaphors and concepts that historiography has lent to translation history scholars over recent decades — such as typicality and representativity versus clues and normal exceptions, hegemonic narratives versus the margins, micro and macro history and their intersections —, and how these were implemented to establish both objects of study and explanatory narratives of causality and change. Second, I will aim to illustrate, through the delimitation and analysis of a constellation of 18th century religious translations between Europe and Spanish America, the capacity of an entangled history of translation to unsettle established historical assumptions regarding the circulation, reception, and critical fortune of ideas, authors, and texts.

Florencia Ferrante is an assistant professor at the University of Genoa. She studied Literature at the University of Buenos Aires and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna. In 2019 She obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Modena. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Genova in a national research project concerning the history of non-literary translation from Italian to Spanish in Latin America. She is the author of a book (Juan Rodolfo Wilcock critico, ETS, 2022) and of different research articles about translation history and literary criticism published in international journals such as Rassegna Iberistica, Hispamérica, 1611. Revista de historia de la traducción and Meta.

Davide Gnoato
(Universität Wien)

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

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Meeting ID: 893 2796 4257
Passcode: 334610

In the second post-war period, a discussion developed in Italy, initially within Italian German studies and gradually spreading to other disciplines, about so-called “Central European” culture. Early examples of this are not just the works of Ladislao Mittner and Claudio Magris but in particular the literary reception by the Milanese publishing house Adelphi (est. 1962), which made much “Mitteleuropean” literature, as they called it, accessible to a wide audience. Using Adelphi’s “Mitteleuropean” book catalogue and the theoretical discourse of that time, I would like to take a closer look at the mediation and resemantisation of “Mitteleuropa” in Italy as a category of imagination. I draw on the Habsburg myth (Magris), the selection-philosophy of “singular books” (“libri unici”, Bazlen), the concepts of places of memory (Nora) and the memory of Central Europe (Csáky) to explain the establishment of a world projection as a publishing subject and, based on Adelphi’s catalogue classification, ‘Central European literature’ as a branch on its own. I would also like to consider the mythical potential of “Mitteleuropa” as a lost or submerged (“versunken”) world, as well as the international resonance of this discourse before (with Kundera and Miłosz, among others) and after 1990. I also make use of the blurbs of various editions of Adelphi to sketch a “Central European mood” which, according to my hypothesis, should not only appeal to a new “wild” (cft. Wagenbach) readership, but also have shaped a lasting idea of an imaginary Central European geography in Italy.

Davide Gnoato is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. He is a recipient of the Marietta Blau Scholarship of the OeAD (Austria) and a former Junior Fellow at the ifk, Vienna (2023–2025). He has been recently a special research student at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice and the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on literary transfer and reception, Central Europe, modernity, decadence, dandyism, and pop culture in music and literature, with a particular interest in Japanese music and reception of Western pop phenomena. He is currently completing his dissertation, “The Adelphi Phenomenon: The Philosophy of the Singular Book and the Reception of ‘Mitteleuropa’ Literature in Italy”.