Fall 2025 Graduate Symposium:

Welcome to the website for the Harvard English Department's Fall 2025 Graduate Symposium!

The theme for this year's symposium is "Generativity and Genre"

Talk of “generativity” is at an all-time high. From “generative AI” to “generational trauma,” discourses of generation permeate contemporary language and discourses on science and technology, art, literature, history, and politics. Where literary scholarship and criticism is concerned, the study of ‘genre’ brings matters of generativity to the fore through considerations of tradition, form, craft, and production. Analyses and critiques of ‘genre’ have generated extensive bodies of scholarship and distinctive genealogies of thought across literary periods and subfields. In “The Law of Genre,” French Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida took on the conventions of genre and asked, “Can one identify a work of art, of whatever sort, but especially a work of discursive art, if it does not bear the mark of a genre, if it does not signal or mention it or make it remarkable in any way?” As Derrida sought to convey, our practices of genre identification are shaped by aesthetic, discursive, political, and historical factors that set the stakes of marking, mixing, bending, and even abolishing the “law of genre.” 

In the so-called “Age of Generative AI,” technological developments compel us to ask urgent questions about the varied sources of production that “generate” art and text, and the political and ethical implications therein. Definitions of the “human” resurface once more in our efforts to clarify the nature of generativity and the “tropes of reproduction” before us. In keeping with the critique of ‘genre’ offered by Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter, we continue to wrestle with enduring questions about the role of literature and language in the generation of “genre/s of Man,” and the extension of the “function of genre” through the production of race, gender, sexuality, and other socio-political classifications. Out of these considerations, scholars have staged critiques and refusals of generativity on old and and new grounds. Resisting the “underlying assumption that productivity (i.e., generativity) is an ethical, moral, biological, and semiotic good,” literary scholar Dixa  Ramírez-D’Oleo’s This Will Not Be Generative drew critical attention to the extractive and antagonistic relationships obscured by ecological fantasies of generativity. From this vantage, we ask: How does literature and language reflect and influence legacies of generation and degeneration, reproduction and destruction? How can critics, as generators of thought, contend with and attend to genre and generativity? What is the point of literary production? What and where is literary production pointing us toward? 

The symposium will take place Thursday, November 6 (Emerson Hall 105) and Friday, November 7 (Thompson Room, Barker Center). Our keynote address will be delivered byDixa Ramírez-D’Oleo (Brown) and our conference will consist of three graduate student panels with faculty respondents. 

Keynote Bio: Dixa Ramírez-D’Oleo is Associate Professor in the English department. Her research and teaching focus on the literatures and histories of the extended Caribbean. She received her A.B. from Brown University in Comparative Literature and her PhD from the University of California, San Diego. Her second book, This Will Not Be Generative (2023), was recently published by Cambridge University Press's Elements in Feminism and Contemporary Critical Theory series. Her first book, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (2018, NYU Press) received the 2019 Barbara Christian Literary Award from the Caribbean Studies Association and the 2019 Isis Duarte Book Prize, Haiti/Dominican Republic Section in the Latin American Studies Association. 

See the "program" tab for a detailed schedule of events and their locations. 

All are welcome to attend! Presenters are encouraged to invite friends and guests. Please contact englishcoordinator@g.harvard.edu if you have any questions.