Keynote Speakers

Sascha Bru

© Sascha Bru

Sascha Bru is a director of the MDRN research lab  and head of the Theory and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Leuven. Bru has produced over a dozen books devoted to a variety of aspects of the European avant-gardes and modernisms, including The European Avant-Gardes, 1905-1935. A Portable Guide (2018), Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes. Writing in the State of Exception (2009), and the co-edited volumes Futurism: A Microhistory (2017) and The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Europe, 1880-1940 (2016). Most recently, his work has come to focus on the relationship between the avant-gardes, history and historiography. From October 2018 onward, he will also be heading a large-scale research programme entitled Literary Knowledge, 1890-1950: European Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe. Bru is a founder of the EAM and an editor-in-chief of the network's book series with De Gruyter. He will be hosting the next EAM conference taking place from 17th until 19th of September 2020 at the University of Leuven.

Keynote on Friday, September 7th (11:30 am), Auditorium Vom-Stein-Haus, Schlossplatz 34
"Representation and History: Realist and Avant-Garde"

Helmut Lethen

© von Lesekreis (Eigenes Werk) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

Helmut Lethen is a German literary and cultural theorist. Born 1939 in Mönchengladbach, he studied in Bonn, Amsterdam and at the Freie Universität Berlin. After editorial work for the magazine Alternative (1964 - 1968), a chair at the department of literary studies in Utrecht (1977 - 1995) and Rostock (1995 - 2004), he worked as a visiting professor in Chicago, Los Angeles and Bloomington, Indiana. From 2007 to 2016 Lethen was head of the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna. His publications include: Neue Sachlichkeit 1924 - 1932. Studien zur Literatur des Weißen Sozialismus (1970), Brechts Hauspostille. Text und kollektives Lesen (1978, in co-authorship with Hans Thies Lehmann), Verhaltenslehren der Kälte (1994), Der Sound der Väter (2006), Suche nach dem Handorakel (2010), Der Schatten des Fotografen (2014) and Die Staatsräte (2018).

Keynote on Wednesday, September 5th (8:15 pm), Auditorium Schloss
"Unter dem Pflaster ist die Kanalisation oder War das Böse für die historischen Avantgarden das wirklich Reale?"

Miglena Nikolchina

© Miglena Nikolchina

Miglena Nikolchina is a literary historian and theoretician whose research engages the interactions of literature, philosophy, political studies, and feminist theory. She is professor at the Department of Theory of Literature at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Her writing has been motivated by a lasting interest in the (para)human as process and transformation, and the artificial being as an artistic and philosophical challenge. She investigated, historically but also in terms of structural impasses, the discursive attainments and failures of two grand projects from the second half of the 20th century: the feminist and the East European “velvet” revolutions. In English, her publications include the books Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf (2004) and Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions: Heterotopias of the Seminar (2013); and, among her more recent articles, “Inverted Forms and Heterotopian Homonymy: Althusser, Mamardashvili, and the Problem of ‘Man’.” boundary 2 (2014) and “Time in Video Games: Repetitions of the New," differences 28.3 (2017).

Keynote on Thursday, September 6th (2:15 pm), Auditorium at the Vom-Stein-Haus, Schlossplatz 34
"From the Impossible to the Virtual: Kristeva's Concept of 'Signifiance' and the Returns of the Avant-garde"