Seminar on loss and melancholia with Prof Mariano Siskind (Harvard University)

RSHA visitor Prof Mariano Siskind will be running a seminar for HDRs, Early- and Mid-Career Researchers in the humanities and the arts. We will be reading and discussing:

• “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop
• “Mauricio (The Eye) Silva,” by Roberto Bolaño

• “Mourning and Melancholia,” by Sigmund Freud.

Mariano Siskind is Smith Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Professor Siskind’s Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2014) received an Honourable mention from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and is a key text in discussions on World Literature theories. His most recent published works include The Routledge Companion to Latin American 20th and 21st Century Literature and Cultural Forms (2022, co-edited with Guillermina de Ferrari), and World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality (2019, co-edited with Gesine Müller).

Central to Professor Siskind’s scholarly work are theories of cosmopolitanism and globalisation, and critical articulations of literature and philosophy, often explored through the lens of nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American literature. His next book, forthcoming in 2025, is Dislocaciones y fin de esto que ya no es mundo: crisis, transiciones e imposibilidades cosmopolitas.