School of Modern Languages & Cultures

The Research Centre for Comparative Literature and Translation’s annual Postgraduate Conference on the theme of Re-Reading took place over two days, Thursday 22 and Friday 23 May 2025. The event featured papers by postgraduate students from Glasgow and around the world, covering a wide range of topics and approaches. It proved to be a very successful conference, offering the audience plenty of food for thought on the topic of re-reading. 'Re-reading' as interpreted by the diverse group of speakers took many forms, on themes such as materiality, emotional resonance, translation, adaptation, re-appropriation, intergenerational dialogue, rewriting, decoloniality, and dystopia. 
 
Highlights of the conference included a keynote address by David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute of World Literature at Harvard University. His talk, titled ‘The Seim Anew: Towards a Map of Re-reading’, explored re-reading as a dynamic, transformative act that allows texts to gain new meanings across time, cultures, media, and languages. He outlined six modes of re-reading—intertextual, intratextual, interlingual, intermedial, intercultural, and intertemporal—showing how each encounter builds richer layers of interpretation. Professor Susan Bassnett responded by emphasising re-reading’s role in personal growth, teaching, and dialogue, highlighting how modern retellings invite fresh engagement with classics. The session concluded with reflections on interdisciplinary approaches and how adaptations can open literature to new audiences. 
 
Another highlight was a panel celebrating the 20th anniversary of the UG Comparative Literature Degree in our School, titled Comparative Literature in Glasgow: Twenty Years On..., chaired by Dr Elwira Grossman, which also features separately in the newsletter. The conference also included a poster session where postgraduate and PhD students from various universities had the opportunity to present their research. Poster titles included: ‘(Mis)translating The Peach Blossom Spring: Translation as a Creative Intervention’ by Gabrielle Tse; ‘Re-Reading the Text of Space: German-Polish Borderlands in Late-Twentieth-Century Polish Prose’ by Olga Grochowska; ‘Queer Re-Reading and Fluid Interpretations: A Comparative Literary Method in Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Liebhaberinnen (1975; Women as Lovers, 1994) and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve. 
 
A full account of the conference, including recordings of the sessions, is now available on the Centre website.

A copy of the conference programme may be found here.

First published: 5 August 2025