Announce

Truth and Representation

The Australian National University, 13-15 December 2017
Proposals: 3 July 2017

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor Nicki Hitchcott, University of St Andrews
Dr Chris Watkin, Monash University

What is truth and how do we represent it? For centuries philosophers, artists, theologians, and political thinkers have reflected on the nature of truth, each exploring the various rhetorical and visual strategies with which we might render its universality and its relativity. When we talk about truth, we call upon objectivity, authenticity, and verifiability. But we also inevitably evoke subjectivity, artifice, and mendacity. Indeed, to talk about truth is to recognise its intimate connection to lies.
In our current political climate, terms such as ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ have become ubiquitous. In the wake of Brexit and the American presidential election, and leading up to the 2017 French election, politicians and the media continually call the status of truth and representation into question. How are we to determine what truth is when facts are manipulated to reflect and reinforce the opinions we already hold? How are we to retain our grasp on reality when we see our world increasingly through the mediation of the screen? Such questions bring to mind a much broader problematic surrounding our understanding of social, cultural, and political reality in the light of myriad and ever-evolving ideologies and theoretical orientations.
This conference seeks to reflect on these questions within French and Francophone Studies. What role can our interdisciplinary research play in negotiating the problems of truth and representation in the 21st century, from cultural studies and politics to literature and film? Our aim is to address these problems from a multiplicity of methodological approaches and areas of focus.
We invite proposals for individual papers (20 minutes) and for panels (3-4 papers of 20 minutes each) related to the theme of truth and representation. We will also consider proposals that do not conform directly to this theme. Possible topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

- Philosophical, theoretical, and historical/historiographical understandings of truth-making
- Representations of Otherness
- Reflections on language and the shaping of political discourse
- The role of truth in education, including plagiarism and academic dishonesty in the language classroom
- Film and the fluid boundaries of audio-visual representation
- Embodied truths, psychic truths, lived realities
- National myths and the politics of migration
- Life-writing/ Representing the truth of the self
- Truth and religious pluralism
- Postmodernism and post-truth
- Representation in (applied) linguistics and second language acquisition
- Imagination, or the truth of fiction

Please send your proposal of 250 words for papers in English or French to asfs_2017@anu.edu.au by 3 July 2017.
Organising committee: Leslie Barnes, Ashok Collins, Solène Inceoglu, and Gemma King, ANU.
https://australiansocietyforfrenchstudies.com/events/asfs-conference/
Source: H-France

19-20 mai 2017

Propositions: le 23 avril 2017

Reid Hall (Columbia University à Paris, 4 rue de Chevreuse – 75006 Paris)

L’ART ET SES REPRESENTATIONS : CONCEPTS, THEORIES, PARADIGMES

Avec Dominique Château, Alexandre Gefen, Maud Pouradier, Laetitia Marcucci, Jacques Morizot, Jean Robelin, Carole Talon-Hugon,

Appréhender un objet comme une œuvre d'art  suppose, sans qu'on en soit ordinairement conscient, une certaine idée de ce qu'est l'art. De manière générale, on ne perçoit qu'en mettant de l'ordre dans l'amas hétéroclite de nos sensations et en les catégorisant grâce à des concepts (de "fleur", de "bâtiment", ou de "chien", par exemple). Autrement dit, les mots grâce auxquels nous ordonnons le monde ne désignent pas tant des choses que des idées abstraites permettant cet ordonnancement. Cela vaut a fortiori pour les objets culturels ; ils ne sont jamais de purs donnés : entre l'objet sensible offert à nos sens et l'appréhension que nous en avons s'intercalent des médiations. Dans le cas particulier qui nous occupe, l'appréhension d'une chose comme une "œuvre d'art" suppose non seulement la mise en jeu de la catégorie mentale générale d'art, mais aussi de sous-catégories comme celles de "peinture", de "musique", de "sculpture" ou de "performance" et, à l'intérieur de ces sous-catégories, d'autres rubriques encore comme, à l'intérieur de la littérature, celles de "roman", de "nouvelle" ou de "poésie", auxquelles s'ajoutent, selon l'équipement culturel de l'individu, des catégories plus fines par sous-genres, mouvements, périodes, etc.

Cette idée de l'art qui sous-tend l’appréhension de ses objets n'est toutefois pas faite que de catégories classificatoires ; elle est aussi composée de croyances concernant les finalités, les usages et les valeurs de ces objets ; elle suppose une certaine manière de penser leurs producteurs, ceux auxquels ils sont destinés, les lieux et les institutions où ils se font et où ils s'exposent. Si bien que ce que nous avons nommé en première approximation une "idée de l'art" est bien plutôt une nébuleuse de concepts, de valeurs et d’usages, liés entre eux de manière souterraine mais étroite. Ainsi, dans l'idée moderne d'art qui se constitue au cours du xviii^e siècle, la catégorie nouvelle de beaux-arts est-elle étroitement solidaire de l'invention du goût comme sens du beau, du désintéressement comme attitude appropriée face aux œuvres, des Salons et de la toute nouvelle critique d’art.  

Comme les concepts de l’art, ses paradigmes évoluent tantôt lentement, tantôt brutalement, de manière partielle ou globale, discrète ou fracassante, et parfois coexistent de manière polémique. Notre mot art n’a ni la même extension ni la même compréhension que l’ars des latins et que la techné des anciens grecs. L’artifex n’était ni un artiste, ni un artisan. Le Moyen Âge ne connaissait pas les "beaux-arts" mais distinguait les arts mécaniques des arts libéraux. Là où la modernité a vu une pratique autonome et autotélique, les époques précédentes ont vu une activité répondant à des fonctions hétéronomes : mettre en relation avec le divin, glorifier les héros, édifier les citoyens, etc. Elles ne rangeaient pas ses œuvres dans le cadre neutre d’un musée, mais dans les lieux liés à leurs fonctions et n’attendait pas des destinataires des œuvres une pure jouissance esthétique désintéressée.

Les théories occupent une place charnière entre les concepts et les paradigmes. Dans ce monde complexe et surdéterminé de l'histoire des représentations de l’art, certains théoriciens ont occupé une place décisive. Sans doute ne sont-ils pas les commencements absolus des positions qu'ils défendent ; mais ils ont activement participé à leur élaboration, les ont cristallisées, fixées, solidifiées, et ont contribué à leur diffusion. Ce sont parfois des philosophes (Aristote, Hutcheson, Dewey…), des historiens de l’art (Vasari, Panofsky, Wölfflin…), des historiens de la culture (Burckhardt, Cassirer, Haskell…), des sociologues et des psychanalystes (Kracauer, Simmel, Bourdieu, Freud…), des théoriciens d'arts particuliers (Jauss, Hanslick, Brecht, Semper…), mais aussi des critiques (La Font de Saint-Yenne, Diderot, Greenberg…), et des artistes-théoriciens (Alberti, Artaud, Baudelaire, Coleridge, Zuccaro, Tolstoï…).

Considérant que l’histoire de l’art n’est pas seulement celle des œuvres, mais indissolublement celle de l’idée même d’art, ce congrès de la SFE invite donc à une archéologie de l’art réfléchissant sur les déplacements et les transformations de ses concepts, les continuités et les ruptures de ses paradigmes et les scansions que représentent ses moments théoriques décisifs.

Modalités de soumission

Les propositions, rédigées en anglais ou en français, doivent comprendre :

·       la thématique retenue

·       le nom de l’auteur ou des auteurs

·       une présentation succincte de l’auteur ou des auteurs (100 mots maximum)

·       le titre

·       un résumé de 300 mots maximum

·       une liste de mots clés (5 maximum)

·       une bibliographie essentielle

·       l’engagement écrit et signé à s’acquitter des droits d’inscription de 50 euros au cas où la proposition serait retenue. Ils donnent droit à la participation au colloque et à la gratuité des déjeuners. NB : Les droits d'inscription des membres de la Société française d'esthétique à jour de leur cotisation sont de 25 euros (pour devenir membre, s'inscrire sur le site web de la SFE http://www.s-f-e.org

Elles seront envoyées au format pdf à Talon-Hugon : Carole.TALON-HUGON@unice.fr

Date limite d’envoi des propositions : 23 avril

Les réponses seront communiquées le : 30 avril   

Les communications, d’une durée de 30 minutes, seront tenues en anglais ou en français. Aucun service d’interprétariat ou de traduction ne pourra être fourni. Les frais d’hébergement et de transport sont à la charge des participants.

Source: Dramatica

Conference hosted by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies in Innsbruck

Thursday, November 30th–Saturday, December 2nd 2017 Proposals due April 30th, 2017

Organised by: Nicolas Detering (Freiburg i. Br.), Clementina Marsico (Innsbruck), Isabella Walser (Innsbruck)

Starting in the post-war decades of the 20th century, the history, the concept, and the identity of Europe as a geographical, cultural, political, religious, and ideological entity has become a popular field of investigation in many different disciplines. Historians, political scientists, and philologists have come to examine the meaning of Europe in the face of contemporary developments and problems, which the European integration is facing. Their research shows that while ancient and medieval writers may have already 'sensed' some sort of European identity, a proper discourse on the continent’s political significance, cultural meaning, historical fate and contemporary crisis – based, for example, on the use of a shared vocabulary (the term 'Europe' among it) and of specific rhetorical strategies (like the personification of Europe) –, only evolved during the 15th and 16th century and proliferated in the 17th and 18th century.

But even though the existing studies have shed some light on the concept of Europe in the works of 'great thinkers' like Piccolomini, Richelieu, or Leibniz, its wide distribution across languages and genres, as well as its influence on the actual shaping of Europe in political, cultural and other related aspects have only recently received more attention. This holds especially true for texts written in Neo-Latin, as is shown by the project entitled Europe and European Identity in Neo-Latin Literature conducted at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin studies in Innsbruck, the organiser of this conference.

This project attempts for the first time to take into consideration the vast amount of Neo-Latin literature processing the discourse on Europe and European identity, for most of what we know so far about the early modern process of the formation of Europe relies almost exclusively on vernacular sources. The dispersion of discourses on Europe across the continent – be it in Latin or in the vernaculars –, however, is difficult to grasp, since they are not restricted to one specific genre. In fact, the discourses span a variety of text types, such as political treatises, poems, novels, commentaries, periodic journals, grammar books, private letters etc. The early modern discourses of Europe rely on an immense communicative network, the contours of which are challenging to decipher.

CONFERENCE AIM AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

To this end, the conference will dive into the early modern days of the notion of Europe. Assuming that discourses on Europe tend to transcend linguistic, historic, and generic boundaries, we invite participants from different fields to examine vernacular and Latin negotiations of Europe from the late 15th to the early 18th century. This multi-angled approach will serve to identify both similarities and differences in the constructions of Europe within its different national and cultural communities. Comparing the results from Neo-Latin studies with the findings of other disciplines, the conference’s main purpose is to investigate the discursive representations of Europe from a contrastive and interdisciplinary pan-European perspective: papers should concern questions of how the term Europe was defined and evaluated, which concepts were attached to Europe, and in which way texts were trying to create or propagate a common European identity in the various languages, disciplines and genres of Early Modernity.

Accordingly, papers regarding the following topics are particularly (but not exclusively) welcome:

• ideas, definitions, interpretations as well as discourses on Europe in texts and media of any given genre (e.g. the geographical concept; the religious idea of Christianitas; the intellectual notion of the res publica litteraria; the cultural image of Europe as the heir of values derived from the ancient past; the political concept of a 'balance of power');
• the 'rhetorics' of Europe, i.e. in which way discourses on Europe are performed and promoted, which metaphors and narratives are employed to describe Europe or to convey the interactions between Europe and its parts (e.g. eroticism of lovers and rivals in allegories);
• the interplay between language and identity, i.e. the role language plays ideologically and politically in shaping identity in connection with the notion of Europe (e.g. Latinitas against the vernaculars);
• relationships between nations and Europe, i.e. the way texts sharpen national identities with regard to the supra-national (e.g. Europe as a plurality of nations following the principle of unity in diversity).

PRACTICALITIES We welcome papers of a maximum of 30 minutes length. Each paper will be followed by ca. 10 minutes of discussion. English will serve as the main conference language. The publication of the papers in a collective conference volume is planned for 2018, the deadline for article submission will be April 30th 2018. To submit a proposal, please send an abstract of your paper (max. 150 words) and a brief curriculum vitae (max. half a page) to isabella.walser@neolatin.lbg.ac.at or clementina.marsico@neolatin.lbg.ac.at before April 30th 2017. The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies will reimburse the travel expenses and compensate for the conference hotel in Innsbruck, max. three nights (arrival Wednesday 29th, departure Saturday, December 2nd 2017). Further information about the conference can be found at http://neolatin.lbg.ac.at.

University of Oxford

28-30 Sept 2017

Deadline for proposals: 15 April 2017

The sixth conference on the history of the humanities, ‘The Making of the Humanities VI’, will take place at the University of Oxford, Humanities Division and Somerville College, UK, from 28 till 30 September 2017. The MoH conferences are organized by the Society for the History of the Humanities and bring together scholars and historians interested in the history of a wide variety of disciplines, including archaeology, art history, historiography, linguistics, literary studies, media studies, musicology, and philology, tracing these fields from their earliest developments to the modern day. We welcome panels and papers on any period or region. We are especially interested in work that compares scholarly practices across humanities disciplines and civilizations. Please note that the Making of the Humanities conferences are not concerned with the history of art, the history of music or the history of literature, and so on, but instead with the history of art history, the history of musicology, the history of literary studies, etc. Keynote Speakers: Elisabeth Décultot, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg: From an Antiquarian to an Historical Approach? The Birth of Art History in the 18th Century Shamil Jeppie, University of Cape Town: Styles of Writing History in Timbuktu and the Sahara/Sahel Peter Mandler, University of Cambridge: The Rise (and Fall?) of the Humanities Paper Submissions: Abstracts of single papers (30 minutes including discussion) should contain the name of the speaker, full contact address (including email address), the title and a summary of the paper of maximally 250 words. For more information about submitting abstracts, see http://www.historyofhumanities.org/. Deadline for abstracts: 15 April 2017 Notification of acceptance: June 2017 Panel Submissions: Panels last 1.5 to 2 hours and can consist of 3-4 papers and possibly a commentary on a coherent theme including discussion. Panel proposals should contain respectively the name of the chair, the names of the speakers and commentator, full contact addresses (including email addresses), the title of the panel, a short (150 words) description of the panel’s content and for each paper an abstract of maximally 250 words. For more information about submitting panels, see http://www.historyofhumanities.org/. Deadline for panel proposals: 15 April 2017 Notification of acceptance: June 2017

University of Maryland Medieval and Early Modern Field Committee

Annual Conference 10–11 November 2017 College Park, Maryland

Proposals due 1 May 2017

Migration(s): Body, Word, Spirit

Migration(s) of various sorts—of people, information, political, religious, and cultural movements—have long transformed the periods, places, and paradigms in which they occur. Recent scholarship has underlined the fundamental importance of migrations in the medieval and early modern periods. Intrinsically interesting in their original context, these historic migrations also provide much-needed perspective on the migrations our world is currently experiencing.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto

We invite 250–300 word proposals for individual 20-minute papers from established scholars and advanced graduate students based on, but not limited to, the themes outlined below. Digital projects welcome.

• Refugees
• Exiles
• Diasporas
• Expatriate/Merchant Communities
• Economic Migrants
• Immigrants/Emigrants
• Books and Manuscripts
• News and Correspondence
• Production/Wholesale/Retail Centers of Book and Manuscript Culture
• Political/Religious/Cultural Ideas
• Pandemic Diseases
• Environmental Change
• Education Reforms

Please submit proposals to the organizers by 1 May 2017. Organizers: Andrea M. Frisch (afrisch@umd.edu) Sabrina Alcorn Baron (sbaron@umd.edu) Stefano Villani (villani@umd.edu) Contact Shaun Russell (sjr@umd.edu) for more information.