This seminar proposes to examine utopian writing and film from South Asia and its diasporas (and utopian writing and film highly influenced by or connected closely to South Asia) in a comparative perspective. While in 2016 we celebrate 500 years of the publication of More’s Utopia,  Sargent and Dutton argued in their Introduction to Utopian […]

Between February and April 2017, Leonie Brasser, Alice Lambert, Laurence Schaack and Martijn van Gils followed a masterclass with Barnita Bagchi as part of their RMA in Comparative Literary Studies. In this masterclass, the students explored how the transcultural plays out in speculative writing. Beginning with an overview of utopian studies, the students decided to […]

Urbanity in the Vernacular: Narrating the City in Modern South Asian Literatures Hans Harder Asiatische Studien – Études Asiatiques, Vol. 70 Issue 2 (May 2016) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/asia-2015-0054 Abstract This article explores some facets of literary urbanity in modern South Asian literatures such as Urdu, Bengali, Hindi and Marathi. Taking the proliferation of megacity research in […]

The utopian sense of breaking with utopian fantasy in the video game Herald Pim van den Berg In video games the sailing ship has almost always been a symbol of exploration, possibility, autonomy, freedom, wealth, and power and hegemony in the positive sense – until now. The video game Herald (2017), developed by the small […]

“This joint Cemore|T2M|Cosmobilities conference will bring together historians, researchers, artists, policy-makers, designers, and innovators to explore Mobile Utopia: pasts, presents, futures. The Centre for Mobilities Research (Cemore) at Lancaster University, the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M) and the Cosmobilities Network have joined together to invite contributions across the spectrum […]