Events
This page lists information on past conferences, symposia and workshops. For upcoming events consult the News section on the Homepage. To see a selection of filmed talks, visit our MDRN YouTube channel.
Apart from annually welcoming a variety of guests for seminar talks, MDRN also hosts a lecture series featuring about five international speakers each year. Learn more about upcoming lectures or browse our archive of filmed lectures here.
This two-day symposium held in Leuven in December 2023 addressed unconventional forms of knowledge and their eclipse in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
This two-day event and symposium at Cinematek (Brussels) in Sept. 2022 brought together historians, archaeologists, and specialists in modernist literature and cinema to investigate the representation of antiquity, especially Etruscan antiquity, on the twentieth century screen.
This conference held in July 2022 at the Academia Belgica and the Università di Roma La Sapienza investigated the rich and hybrid Poesia Visiva phenomenon in Italy and Belgium.
This interdisciplinary conference held at Leuven in May 2022 aimed to re-examine the theory and practice of the historical avant-gardes’ Gesamtkunstwerk. What, if anything, was specific to the historical avant-gardes’ Total Work of Art?
This conference held at Leuven in April 2022 was a two-day academic and cultural event dedicated to the work and (after)life of the celebrated Polish theatre maker and visual artist Tadeusz Kantor.
This final conference of the ERC-funded project Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism was held at Leuven in April 2022. It mapped the protean manifestations of mimesis from a transdisciplinary perspective.
This international symposium on the role of paper in the European avant-gardes during the first half of the 20th century was held at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in collaboration with the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
This symposium held in Leuven in February 2022 sought to address a simple question: what significant changes in the relation between science and literature in the modernist period (1890-1950) have either received too little attention, or have received a great deal of attention but require revision?
Before Europe: the Classic Avant-Gardes in the Longue Durée (Leuven, Dec. 2021) was a conference that charted how the avant-gardes, both within Europe and beyond, engaged with the longue durée, with “prehistory” and with civilizations more temporally remote than Greco-Roman Antiquity.
The Tales of Archaeology. Towards a Literary ‘Memory Map’ of the Mediterranean Space was a conference that took place in Sept. 2021 at the Academia Belgica in Rome, in collaboration with the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia.
The conference The Poetics of Precarity, held at the University of Leuven in Dec. 2020, focused on the intellectual and cultural imaginations of precarity from the late 19th century onward.