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Dear list members, I would like to draw your attention to the new graduate seminar on German philosophy and literature, which I will be convening at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (School of Advanced Study, University of London) next year. The seminar will focus on ‚The German Enlightenment in Philosophy and Literature. Ideas, Aporias, Legacy‘, and will consist of five meetings to be held from 17.00 until 19.00 on 4 February, 18 February, 3 March, 28 April, and 26 May 2016. The assumption underlying this seminar is that in the last decades scholarship on the German Enlightenment has followed quite new paths. After moving away from the old narrative of a sterile, naïvely optimistic and rationalist movement, scholars rediscovered the German Enlightenment as intrinsically open-minded and, insofar, as a crucial step toward contemporary culture. A key-feature of this new approach is the dismissal of any dogmatic interpretative claim and the consequent acknowledgment that the project of the Enlightenment itself is not free from shortcomings, which however do not diminish its value for us today. The seminar aims to explore this new territory from an interdisciplinary perspective: philosophical and literary texts by, among others, Kant, Mendelssohn, Schiller, Hegel and Arendt, will be read and discussed, both in German original and in English translation. Suggestions on other eighteenth-, nineteenth- or twentieth-century texts, which might shed new light on the Enlightenment itself or its legacy, will be welcome. The five sessions will consist of close readings introduced by a speaker and following informal discussion among the attendees. The first meeting will be introduced and chaired by me, and external invited speakers may occasionally help explore the unsuspected richness of close reading as a method. On 26 May, professor Valerio Rocco Lozano from the University of Madrid will give an introductory talk on Hegel and the Enlightenment basing on readings from the ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’. The reading group is primarily aimed at graduates in both German and Philosophy, but is open to all. Graduates are warmly invited to propose topics, texts and authors, and to give introductory talks themselves. For any kind of questions please do not hesitate to write me at: [log in to unmask] Further details: http://events.sas.ac.uk/imlr/events/view/18179/The+German+Enlightenment+in+Philosophy+and+Literature.+Ideas%2C+Aporias%2C+Legacy Thank you very much. All best, Laura