Upcoming / ongoing
Conference ‘Psalms and Paraphrases’
The Book of Psalms holds a central place in both Jewish and Christian traditions, acting as a prayerful bridge between the divine and the human. Through the centuries, it has been translated, versified, and reimagined to suit new linguistic landscapes and historical realities. As a result, it provides the perfect medium through which to investigate…
Unlearning and Relearning Latin: Perspectives on Decolonizing Latin Literary Studies in Practice
From justifying the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of ‘America’ to providing an aesthetic (visual) language to Italian Fascism, Latin has historically been implicated in shaping and facilitating colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacism. Over the course of the last decades, many have questioned and criticized the field’s close relationship to these systems of oppression. And…
Call for Papers: Psalms and Paraphrases
Psalms, their translations and poetical rewritings are the focus of the SRN Literature without Borders’ next conference on 12-13 May 2026 in Leuven. The deadline for the CfP is 15 January 2026.
Medieval Texts and their Social Contexts: Performance, Performativity, Agents and Genres
Conference Date: 13–14 November 2025Location: Sint-Baafshuis – Room 1.07. Biezekapelstraat 2, Ghent, Belgium.Opposite the ibis hotel, next to the cathedral. Bikes via Kapittelstraat entrance.Registration via: https://event.ugent.be/registration/medievalperformance TopicPerformance and performativity have proved to be highly productive concepts for understanding the social worlds of medieval texts in diverse literary, linguistic and historical contexts. Through associable notions of orality, aurality, gesture,…
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Literatures without Borders
Pre-modern literary transnationalism from a historical-comparative perspective The international Scientific Research Group (SRN) ‘Literatures without Borders’, funded by the Research-foundation Flanders (FWO) organizes a conference on premodern transnational literatures in the Palace of the Academies in Brussels on 19 and 20 June 2025. The conference aims to investigate how transnational/cosmopolitan literatures function, and if a…
Waterways and Literary Channels of the Pre-Modern World
This workshop explores the various appearances and meanings of water in pre-modern literary cultures. What role did the geography of waterways play in the transregional movement of authors, texts, styles, and poetics? What commonalities and differences can we identify across pre-modern literary canons, including those in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and other vernaculars? How does…
Latin-Greek Code-Switching in Early Modernity
The first workshop funded by “Literatures without Borders” will take place in Leuven (Belgium) from 13 to 14 October 2022. The event, organised by William Barton and Raf Van Rooy, is a collaboration between the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies and the University of Leuven. The exchange will deal with linguistic and literary questions regarding…