26 September 2026 · Day 3
Session 7: Urban Sensibilities and Imaginaries
Chair: Rabea Klesing
Venue: Vincas Krėvė auditorium (Room 118), Faculty of Philology
Aliyah Alsaber (Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Saudi Arabia)
The Smell of Cities: Olfactory Urban Memory in Habib Selmi’s The Scents of Marie-Claire
Tetyana Kasima (University of Tartu, Estonia)
Magical Urbanism and the Everyday City: Micro-Urban Experiences in Lispector and Lahiri
Donata Mitaitė (Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Lithuania)
Vilnius: A Dangerous and Intimate City in Lithuanian Poetry
Deividas Zibalas (Vilnius University, Lithuania)
Narrating Edinburgh: A Spatial Analysis of Irvine Welsh’s Porno
Session 8: Beyond the Visible City
Chair: Jekaterina Lavrinec
Venue: Room 115A, Faculty of Philology
Marija Spirkovska (Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany)
‘And the skies it gave me!’: The Mental Asylum as Urban Extension in Patrick McGrath’s Spider (1990)
Carolin Jesussek (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany)
Narrating a Gothic Minneapolis: Indigenous Place-Making in Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021)
Sonja Lampinen (Tampere University, Finland) & Riikka Pulkkinen (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Narratives from the Shadows. A Geocritical Exploration of the Eleonas Flea Market
Ene-Reet Soovik (University of Tartu, Estonia)
“City of Better Cohabitation”: The Biophilic Tartu in Contemporary Estonian Poetry
Iryna Antonenko (University of Gdansk, Poland)
The City of Vanities and the Global City: Urban Solitude from Wolfe to DeLillo
Coffee break
Multilingual Literature in Vilnius: Alien Worlds or Intertwined Urban Networks?
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas (Vilnius University)
Chair: Karolina Bagdonė
Venue: Vincas Krėvė auditorium (Room 118), Faculty of Philology
Lunch (on-site)
Exploring Vilnius in groups
Tour guided by dr. Jekaterina Lavrinec, the co-founder of the Laboratory for Urban games and research Laimikis.lt, Vilnius TECH Faculty of Creative Industries
Meeting point: Europe's square, by the fontain Konstitucijos pr. 2, Vilnius
Reading Šnipiškės: Urban Stories, Signs and the Urbingo Game
This interactive urban walk invites conference participants to explore Šnipiškės, one of Vilnius’ historic neighbourhoods, through the urban game Urbingo, developed by Laimikis.lt as a tool for exploring rapidly changing urban areas and documenting their material culture and local stories. Long represented as a marginal and crime-ridden neighbourhood, this historic suburb of Vilnius has many faces. Once associated with crafts, including ceramic production and glassmaking, Šnipiškės later accommodated new urban functions. The twentieth century brought the tragic loss of many of the families who had inhabited these houses, followed by profound changes in the neighbourhood’s ways of life, later echoed in the informal nickname “Shanghai”. While perceptions of Šnipiškės as a marginal neighbourhood have gradually shifted in recent years, behind its changing image lies a complex cultural landscape shaped by different stories and everyday practices.
The walk will begin with an introduction to the history and transformation of this historic, multicultural neighbourhood, as well as to community-based activities in the area. Participants will then use Urbingo cards to navigate the wooden part of Šnipiškės, searching for architectural details, signs and traces of everyday life and connecting them with stories associated with particular places. Rather than presenting the neighbourhood through a single historical narrative, the walk approaches Šnipiškės as a multilayered urban landscape: wooden architecture, street patterns, and material details are explored alongside local stories and practices. In this way, participants encounter both the visible fabric of the neighbourhood and less visible layers of knowledge preserved and transmitted by its residents. Urban games can thus become tools for reading the city, documenting local heritage, and bringing together historical knowledge, material traces and local stories.
Tour guided by dr. Laimonas Briedis, the author of the book Vilnius: City of Strangers (2009)
Meeting point: at the fountain in the Sarbievijus Courtyard of the Department of Philology
Vilnius: a stranger in Europe
The tour explores Vilnius’s unsettled and meandering position in Europe. Following the paths of several foreign visitors and native exiles, this walking travelogue offers a semi-fictional engagement with locations across the Old Town, foregrounding the city’s polychromatic experiences and multicultural narratives. In a patchwork fashion, the tour traverses the textual and cultural spaces of Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian, German, and other linguistic communities. Some of the material will be drawn from the lecture Beyond Vilnius: The Departure from Things Human (September 25), though the two are separate events. At the heart of the tour is a lingering question: whose voice speaks through the memory of Vilnius, and who is there to attend to it?
The tour will last approximately an hour and a half, with some time reserved for questions and discussions. Please dress appropriately for the weather and wear comfortable shoes, as the streets and pavements of the Old Town can occasionally be tricky terrain. We will meet at 15.00 at the fountain in the Sarbievijus Courtyard of the Department of Philology. See you there!