On 20 November 2025, 13:00–14:30 UTC, our Committee member Prof. Dr. Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens Institute KNAW and University of Amsterdam) will open the 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.
Info and registration: https://www.ailc-icla.org/events/the-ailc-icla-annual-lecture-2025/
Program
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