The AILC-ICLA Annual Lecture 2025

The AILC-ICLA Annual Lecture 2025

Welcome to the AILC-ICLA Annual Lecture 2025! 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.

Agenda:

Chairs: Yina Cao (Sichuan University) and Fotis Jannidis (University of Würzburg)

Respondent: Massimo Salgaro (University of Verona)

Marko Juvan (University of Ljubljana), Introductory remarks

Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens Institute KNAW and University of Amsterdam), `"Perceptions of Literariness Across Borders"