Conference || 15-17 May 2025 || Justus Lipsiuszaal, Erasmushuis, Blijde Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven

Contemporary culture is obsessed with generational identities. Everywhere, individuals are categorized under sweeping labels according to their age cohorts. At the same time, a fixation with mapping out origins flourishes, sustained by the expansion of platforms offering ancestral family tracing. In literature, too, generations and genealogies are omnipresent. This conference offers critical insights and reflections on how generations, genealogies and family structure are imagined, theorized and disseminated within both fictional and non-fictional narratives.

15th May 2025
 

9.00-9.30 Registration

9.30-9.45 Welcome

9.45- 11.00 Keynote Lecture 1:

Jennie Bristow (Canterbury Christ Church University): “Toxic Pasts and Stolen Futures? Generational Conflict and the Modern Culture Wars”

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break 

11.30-13.00 Panel 1: Generations: between Collaboration and Conflict

Ruth Van Hecke (KU Leuven): “Narrative Constructions of Female Adolescence through Generational Conflicts in Dutch-language Interwar Literature”

Sara Villamarín-Freire (University of Santiago de Compostela): “ ‘A kind of an unmovable, iconic position’: Narrating a Father’s Death in Contemporary Literature”

Moritz Senft-Raiß (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität): “Linking the Generational Chain through Narration: Concerning two Texts by Adalbert Stifter”

13.00- 14.00 Lunch 

14.00-15.30 Panel 2: Diasporic Genealogies

Maria Menzel (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität): “Discovering roots, discovering routes: Genealogy tourism in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara”

Judith Neder (TU Dresden): “Intergenerational Self and Diasporic Coming-of-Age in PP Wong’s Life of a Banana (2015)”

Hogara Matsumoto (Sophia University, Tokyo): “Transnational Family Genealogies in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows”

15.30-16.00 Coffee 

16.00-17.30 Panel 3: Memory and Family in Contemporary Literature

Andree Michaelis-König (University of Antwerp): “On Siblings, Twins, and Friends. Shifting Genealogies in Contemporary German Jewish Writing”

Guillaume Etienne (UNamur): “Zu Fuß durch die Ruinen der europäischen Vergangenheit: Physische und emotionale Rekonstruktion der Familiengeschichte in Christiane Hoffmanns Alles, was wir nicht erinnern. Zu Fuß auf dem Fluchtweg meines Vaters (2022)”

Joke Struyf (University of Antwerp): “The death of Vivek Oji (2020)”

17.30 Reception

16th May 2025
 

09.30-10.30 Panel 4: Elective Family Ties

Ana Bessa Carvalho (University of Minho): “On Binders and the Ties that Bind: Alternative Systems of Kinship in Transgender Narratives”

Cato Defoer (Ghent University): “Elective kinship in 21st-century (German-language) literature”

10.30-13.30 (Artes Library Tour + Lunch)

Panel 5: Matriarchy

Beatriz Seelaender (University of São Paulo): “Robert Graves’s “I, Claudius” (1934) : The Early Roman Empire as a (Cursed) Generational Saga”

Dagmar Reichardt (Latvian Academy of Culture): “Transcultural Genealogical Bounds between Fiction and Metahistory: The Matriarchal HERstory of the Maraini Family from Italy’s Risorgimento to Postmodern Times”

Lauren Ottaviani (KU Leuven): “Class and the Mother-in-Law in the Short Fiction of the Woman at Home (1893-1918)”

15.00-15.30 Coffee Break

15.30-16.30 Panel 6: Genealogy in 19th century British Literature

Helen Kingstone (Royal Holloway): “Generational thinking in nineteenth-century Literature”

David McAllister (University of London): “Inter-Generational Resentment in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son”

16.30-17.45 Keynote Lecture 2:

Stefan Willer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): “Family Inheritance and How (Not) to Escape It: Fictions and Non-Fictions in Contemporary German Literature”

18.00 Conference Dinner

17th May 2025
 

09.30- 10.30 Panel 7: Women and Genealogy

Sarah Sosinski (Ludwig-Maximilians-University): “The Generational Project of Emancipation: German Jewish Family Novels as Transnational Narratives of Belonging”

Fatima Borrmann (KU Leuven): “From Genetics to Female genealogy and Generation in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus (1921)”

10.30-11.00 Coffee Break

11.00-12.15 Keynote Lecture 3:

David Amigoni (Keele University): “Generations, Ageing, and the Resourceful Fictions of Middle England: performing family sagas from Arnold Bennett to Jonathan Coe”

12.15- 12.30 Conference Closing