On 20 November 2025, at 13.00-14.30 UTC, the AILC-ICLA is delighted to welcome Prof. Dr. Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens Institute KNAW and University of Amsterdam), who will open our new series of ICLA Annual Lectures with a talk entitled "Perceptions of Literariness Across Borders".
In this talk, Prof. van Dalen-Oskam will present insights from two groundbreaking projects: The Riddle of Literary Quality (2012–2020, Netherlands) and its successor Novel Perceptions: Towards an Inclusive Canon (2020–2022, United Kingdom). Both projects carried out extensive reader surveys, asking participants to evaluate 400 contemporary novels, and combined these findings with large-scale stylometric analysis. This unique approach opens up new perspectives on the sociological and linguistic dimensions of literary evaluation: Do lowly rated novels share distinctive stylistic features? How do genre, gender, and translation shape perceptions?
Prof. van Dalen-Oskam is head of the Computational Literary Studies research group at the Huygens Institute (KNAW) and holds a special chair in Computational Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research bridges quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore the stylistic features of contemporary novels.
The Lecture will be chaired by Professor Marko Juvan, Senior Researcher at the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, Professor of Slovenian Literature and Literary Theory at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and member of Academia Europaea.
We warmly invite all interested to join this lecture for a fascinating exploration of how readers, cultures, and languages shape the boundaries of literature.
Details about registration and the connection link will be announced later.
