27 October 2025 | Utrecht University
While serving as a meeting occasion for the entire OSL community, the 2025 OSL Research Day will take the shape of a symposium focusing on a specific theme – namely the intersections of Medical Humanities and Affect Theory, examining how literature and cultural narratives mediate experiences of illness, embodiment, and care. The symposium asks: how do literary and artistic representations of illness shape the way we suffer, heal, and endure? How does affect – pain, anxiety, hope, frustration – structure the experience of illness and medical intervention? How do different genres, from lyric poetry to the illness memoir, from fiction to medical case studies, construct or challenge dominant narratives of health and disability?

7 November 2025 | University of Groningen
This masterclass, organized by Bryan Wagner (UC Berkeley) and Danielle van den Brink (RUG), brings together scholars and artists from the US and Europe through the UC Berkeley and NEH-funded initiative titled ‘An Open Classroom on New Orleans Culture’. Using the materials from this collaborative project, we will bring an expansive and diverse study of the cultural narratives of New Orleans to Groningen.

October – December | Leiden University / University of Amsterdam
In this workshop, we will investigate how literature is able to reflect, talk back, deconstruct and challenge different narratives of Europe that circulate in the European public sphere. Narratives, for example, that teleologically construct Europe as having a clear historical origin; that rewrite European history to serve a specific political agenda; that function as bordering spaces of in- and exclusion; that imagine Europeans as a homogeneous group; or that conceive of Europe as a social constitution of overlapping and potentially conflicting identities.

November 2025 – January 2026 | University of Amsterdam
This seminar explores literature across different cultures, times, and spaces, emphasising Sedgwick’s concept of ‘across-ness’. It introduces foundational texts and theories related to gender and sexuality and provides new and critical perspectives on queer scholarship and activism. We aim to shed light on diverse and complex perspectives, particularly of the Global South. The seminar seeks to promote more inclusive and equitable approaches to queer theory.

5-6 February 2026 | Utrecht University
This symposium will focus on the theme of liminality in Gothic and speculative literature and culture. Gothic fiction has long been preoccupied with thresholds: spaces and states of ambiguity, transition, and transformation.