With the proliferation of online lectures, working groups and all manner of events, we at the JHI Blog thought it would be a good idea to consolidate news and opportunities relevant to our colleagues working in intellectual history. We will publish these roundups of public lectures, conferences, calls for papers, working groups and new journal issues every other Saturday.
Lecture: “Medievalism, Extremism, and ‘White History'” (Amy S. Kaufman)
German Historical Institute, London
The attack on the US Capitol in January 2021 showed right-wing extremists sporting a chaotic and cross-temporal panoply of symbols : from Spartan helmets and Confederate flags to Templar patches, Norse runes, an Indigenous headdress, and video game logos. This talk will explain how extremists weave symbols from particular historical moments, and from renditions of those moments in popular culture, into an alternate historical narrative that can most accurately be called ‘White History’ – a mythical understanding of the past that elevates whiteness, colonialism, and masculinity.
Tuesday, May 25, 5.30pm London Time. Registration.
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Book Talk: Dr. Charles Devellennes, Positive Atheism: Bayle, Meslier, D’Holbach, Diderot (Edinburgh University Press)
The International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism
Wednesday, 26 May 13.00 ET. Contact: ishashmail@gmail.com
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Lecture: “Out for a Walk in the Middle Voice” (Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University)
Environmental Humanities Center, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Professor Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke UP, 2010) had huge impact on thinking about distributed agency and vital materiality in the Environmental Humanities. In her new book Influx and Efflux (Duke UP, 2020), Bennett picks up the question central also to Vibrant Matter: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences?
Thursday 3 June, 20:00hrs CEST on Zoom. Registration.
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Conference: Force of Myth: Authority, Illusion, and Critique in Modern Imaginaries
Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
A three-day virtual conference on political myth.
Keynote speakers: Bernard E. Harcourt (Columbia University/EHESS), Pini Ifergan (Bar-Ilan University/the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), and Chiara Bottici (New School).
Monday–Wednesday, June 7–9, 2021. Registration.
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Workshop: The Philosophy and Critical Thinking of AI
University of Oxford
By questioning and bringing to bear various critical perspectives on AI from a wide range of disciplines (including philosophical, literary, historical, scientific, economical, political, aesthetic and environmental), this event will critically examine and theoretically unpack the promises and problems of AI.
Tuesday 15 June 2021, 2.00pm – 5.30pm (British Time). Registration.
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Call for Papers: Women in Intellectual History: An Online Seminar of the International Society for Intellectual History
Through a series of online meetings in autumn and winter 2021, featuring selected presentations and commentary followed by discussion, early career researchers active in the field of women’s intellectual history will be able to connect with each other and with senior scholars with matching expertise. Submissions from a broad range of specialisations—including the history of social, political, legal and economic thought, literary history, the history of philosophy, and the history of science—and across historical periods and geographical boundaries are encouraged.
If you are an early career researcher and would like to participate in this seminar by giving a paper, please send an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short bio to elias.buchetmann@eui.eu by 23 June 2021.
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Call for Papers: The Global 1922: New Critical Reflections (Thursday, 31 March 2022)
King’s College London
The year 2022 marks the centenary of the end of Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922. This war was one of the final conflicts of a decade-long series of wars to which historians have referred as the ‘Greater War’ decade. The war coincided with the end of the many conflicts and diplomatic or political processes that transformed eastern Europe and Russia as well as the Near and Middle East. It also marked an acute humanitarian crisis following the dislocation of minority populations
across the Aegean Sea, one of the largest single population transfers of the Greater War decade.
We are interested in original contributions for an international conference tentatively planned as a one-day event in London on Thursday, 31 March 2022. The organizers aim to publish a selection of papers from the conference in the form of an edited book or a journal special issue. The publication plans will be finalized in a follow-up workshop in Greece.
We invite interested applicants to submit a 500-word abstract and a one-page CV by 26 July 2021 to this email address: chs@kcl.ac.uk with reference ‘1922-2022 conference’. The successful applicants will be notified by early September 2021 and will be asked to submit a 2,500-word draft by 1 February 2022. Full call here.
