Transnational Literatures and Arts

This collection takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and arts (including the visual arts, performance, film, design, architecture, cultural heritage and art history) as a transnational site of exchange. Adopting transnational as well as ‘glocal’ perspectives over the longue durée, it explores topics from the pre-modern through modern and contemporary eras. Rather than studying cases and concepts that reinforce national literary and artistic frameworks, it investigates literature and the arts as sites of contact and friction between languages, ideas, practices, literary and artistic institutions, artists, authors and audiences.

Committed to building up an archive on the transnational turn in literature and arts, the collection thus features research on a wide range of issues that challenge the national container model that has dominated literary history, museum practices and art curatorship since the 19th century.

Potential topics for submissions on transnational literatures include: Language switching, translingualism, multilingualism and translation; Modes of transfer and transnational network; Transnational intertextuality and intermediality; Literary theory and cultural criticism; Transnational literary history; Environmental Humanities and Posthumanities in transnational literature; Migration and mobility in transnational literature; Citizenship and democracy in transnational literature.

Potential topics for submissions on transnational practices in the arts include: Mobility of artists and artworks, styles and iconographies; Migratory artists and experiences of exile and refugeeism as forces shaping the arts; Issues of multicultural identity, gender, ethnicity, and transnationalism in the arts; The role of art collections and collecting practices in shaping socio-cultural perceptions of mobility and multiculturalism; decolonial approaches to cross-regional art histories; concepts of performativity and materiality as tools for transcultural art history writing.

Collection advisors: Anu Allas (Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia), Peggy Karpouzou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece), Eneken Laanes (Tallinn University, Estonia), Nikoleta Zampaki (University of Information, Technology and Management, Poland)