What does it mean to “feel formal,” and what does it mean to write and speak about different forms of feeling in the first place? Does it even make sense to speak of form in relation to feeling?

This seminar brings together six graduate students based in Southeast Asia and Professor Robert Mitchell (Duke) and Professor Courtney Smith (Wesleyan) for a two-day conversation in Singapore on the feelings (and not-feelings) that define an increasingly precarious world and the new vocabularies we might develop for talking about them. Beginning from the premise that studying and talking about affect, feeling, and emotions can reveal the oft-obscured connections between persons, communities, and things, we will reach towards new ways of reading and writing to better understand the narratives and silences that structure historical and literary archives.

Each student will deliver a 25-minute presentation based on a pre-circulated paper of around 5000 words. This presentation will be followed by a 15-minute commentary by either Professor Mitchell or Professor Smith, after which the floor will be open to discussion.

The seminar will span the course of 2 days (July 10 and 11, 2025) with the occasional short lecture, and there will be plenty of time for socialization.

The travel and accommodation costs for all participants will be covered by Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). All applications and questions should be directed to liqi.peh@ntu.edu.sg. 

250-word abstract submissions should be submitted, along with a brief CV. Complete 5000-word essays will be due by 31 May 2025. 

Graduate students working with different objects of study and methods and approaches from different fields are all welcome, but those working with literary works and in the global eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be given priority. All applicants should be based in Southeast Asia.

• Possible topics include:
• The politics of cure
• New directions in affect theory
• Affect and subjectivity
• Kinship and kin-making
• Failures of feeling
• Race as a form of intimate attachment
• Affect as capital
• Cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism
• Archival silences
• Genealogies of animality and the “human”