24 September 2026 · Day 1
Registration and Coffee
Venue: Vincas Krėvė auditorium (Room 118), Faculty of Philology
Opening Remarks and Welcome Address
Site-specific Literature in Urban Context: A Comparative European Perspective
Lieven Ameel (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Chair: Mindaugas Kvietkauskas
Venue: Vincas Krėvė auditorium (Room 118), Faculty of Philology
Coffee break
Plenary Session: Critical Frameworks for Literary Urban Studies
Chair: Cecile Sandten
Venue: Vincas Krėvė auditorium (Room 118), Faculty of Philology
Gábor Bednanics (Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Hungary)
Poetics as Urban Architecture: Global and Hungarian Modernist Cities
Núria Codina, Marialena Avgerinou, Sonja Faaren Ruud (University of Leuven, Belgium)
Remaking the City from Below: Collaborative Writing Initiatives in Multilingual Spaces
Inga Vidugirytė (Vilnius University, Lithuania)
Her City, Her Theory: Reframing Urbanity in Contemporary Women’s Writing
Lunch (on-site)
Session 1: Mapping the Unmappable City
Chair: Julija Snežko
Venue: Room 115A, Faculty of Philology
Rebecca Hutcheon (University of South Wales, United Kingdom)
‘To Produce a Realistic Effect’: The Process of Mapping Sherlock Holmes’s London
Nicholas Henke (The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA)
Urban Secrecy in Dickens’ Bleak House: Making the Impenetrable City
S. N. Kiran (Tumkur University, India)
Urban Legends and Mythology in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) and Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (2023)
Session 2: Power, Place and Urban Subjectivities
Chair: Daria Semenova
Venue: Vincas Krėvė auditorium (Room 118), Faculty of Philology
Alexandru Matei (Transylvania University, Romania)
Political Paris 2000–2025: Jean Echenoz, Nathalie Quintane and the contemporary literature in Hexagonal France
Oksana Starshova (Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, Ukraine)
Imagining Belonging: Migrant Spatial Narratives of New York in Maria Elena Sandovici’s Dogs with Bagels
Rabea Klesing (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)
The Politics of Estrangement: Urban Imaginaries between Istanbul and Berlin in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn
Gabriel Felipe da Silva (Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil and Coimbra University, Portugal)
From poverty to property: space, social mobility, and the construction of subjectivity in Graciliano Ramos’s São Bernardo
Coffee break
The City and Its Mural Maps: Street Art and Interstices
Bertrand Westphal (University of Limoges, France)
Chair: Eric Prieto
Venue: Vincas Krėvė auditorium (Room 118), Faculty of Philology
Free time
Reception dinner