Earlier this month, I participated in the annual Summer School of the Harvard Institute for World Literature (IWL), held at Harvard university.
I was fortunate to be assigned a spot on David Damrosch’s popular Seminar ‘Globalization and Its Discontents’, where we reflected on the methods of Comparativism and theories of ‘World literature’ trough a range of critical and creative texts, from Goethe to Emily Apter, from the short stories of Clarice Lispector to Ang Lee’s Film Lust, Caution.
I also participated in a Colloquium on the topic ‘World Literature and production’, where I presented a paper from my research on Publishers’ Series as a significant gauge and determinant of cultural understandings of the term ‘World Literature’.
I intend to explore this topic further with a group of colleagues working on a range of publishers series from different geographic and linguistic contexts, stretching from the 19th to the 21st centuries, at a workshop funded by the Oxford Berlin Partnership/BUa, Scheduled to take place This September.
Next year, the IWL Summer School will be hosted at my own Home Institution, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. As part of the core organising team for this event, I was glad to be able to get some first-hand insights into the running of the programme this summer.
Preparations for next year are already well under way, and I look forward to welcoming many new and familiar colleagues to Berlin for IWL 2026!
Evi Heinz 