From 29 June to 23 July 2026, the 16th Session of the Harvard Institute for World Literature took place at Hu Berlin. The session was hosted by the Bua/Oxford-Berlin-Funded project ‘The Boundaries of Cosmopolis’, led by Stefano Evangelista (Oxford) and Gesa Stedman (HU Berlin), with myself as lead local organiser.
We Welcomed 140 international participants for a four-week programme consisting of daily seminars and weekly colloquia, focussing on different topics in the field of World LIterature. Seminars were taught by guest lecturers including Thomas Claviez (Bern), B. Venkat Mani (Wisconsin-Madison), Ankhi Mukherjee (Oxford), and Delia Ungureanu (Bucharest), and covered a range of themes from theories of Cosmopolitanism to Literatures of migration.
The SUmmer school also featured weekly Lectures by Guest speakers including DAvid Damrosch (Harvard), Elleke Boehmer (Oxford) and Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary, UNiversity of London). A further highlight of the Programme was a reading and Discussion with the author Judith Schalanksy and the Translator Imogen Taylor, moderated by Lawrence Venuti (Temple University).
It was a pleasure to host this brilliant group of comparatists from all over the world at HU Berlin and I hope that many of them will return for future projects.
Photo Credit: Philipp Plum.
Evi Heinz 