April 1, 2026

Speaker: Irving Goh, Professor of Comparative Literature, Emory University

Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
All are welcome. Registration is required.
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=106069

In this talk, Irving Goh will present on his latest book, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). He will share his thoughts on failure as failure, that is, failure without recuperation, failure as all negativity. Such a thinking of failure as a thorough impasse not only resists narratives of progress and ideologies of success and its accompanying notions of grit and resilience. It also registers, at the ontological level, the affective structure of existence. Irving will also discuss the literary texts that inform his work on failure.

Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP, 2014), which won the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, L’existence prépositionnelle (Galilée, 2019), The Deconstruction of Sex (with Jean-Luc Nancy, Duke UP, 2021), and most recently, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). His next book, Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit (Cornell UP), is appearing this summer 2026. For his current book projects, he is interested in the end(s) of work, world literature and the question of citizenship, and theorizing the Asian figure.

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

Speaker: Christina Bezari, Senior Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Brussels

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Time: 12 noon Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
All are welcome. No registration required.

Recent studies have theorized the Mediterranean as a privileged site for the study of literary and geopolitical interactions in the twentieth century. Despite these advances, Southern Europe and the Maghreb have often been studied in isolation and have occupied a “peripheral” position with regard to the more “dominant” centers of political power. The main objective of this lecture is to shed light on Southern European and Maghrebi women’s participation in transnational anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements by analyzing their contributions as writers, journalists and editors of periodicals. Long regarded as “marginal actors” in the public sphere, women’s participation in the press and in transnational networks of solidarity has been obscured due to a long history of censorship, colonial domination and dictatorial rule on both sides of the Mediterranean. By considering women as cultural mediators and agents of resistance within a comparative, trans-Mediterranean framework, this lecture aims to challenge traditional Eurocentric narratives and examine women’s texts as sites of political engagement.

Christina Bezari is a senior post-doctoral fellow at the University of Brussels (ULB). Her research is located at the intersection of comparative literature, Mediterranean studies and women’s history. She is the author of Transnational Modernity in Southern Europe: Women’s Periodicals and Salon Culture (Routledge, 2023) and the co-editor of the special issue “Latinity and Modernity: Cultural Identities and Transnational Exchange in a Globalizing World” (2025). Her research focuses on transnational networks of writers, editors, translators and cultural mediators in Southern Europe and the Maghreb. She has previously co-directed an international project on the “imaginaries of translation” at Sorbonne University (Paris-IV).

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

Day: April 1, 2026

Living On After Failure

Women’s Transnational Networks of Solidarity: Anti-Colonial and Anti-Fascist Movements across the Mediterranean

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