Categories
News and Events

Announcing the JHI’s 2020 Selma V. Forkosch Prize Winner

The winner of the JHI‘s Selma V. Forkosch Prize for the best article published in Volume 81 (2020) is Sharon Achinstein, for “Hugo Grotius and Marriage’s Global Past: Conjugal Thinking in Early Modern Political Thought” (volume 81, number 2, pages 195–215).

The judging committee provides the following statement:

The committee has agreed to award the prize for the best essay published in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 2020 to Sharon Achinstein, “Hugo Grotius and Marriage’s Global Past: Conjugal Thinking in Early Modern Political Thought” (vol. 81, no. 2, pp. 195–215). In an extensive examination of the Dutch early modern political theorist, Hugo Grotius, Achinstein traces how the “gendered logic” of marriage, which positioned wives under the guardianship or tutelage of their husbands, extends to political theory and theories of the state. In stunning detail, Achinstein describes how the power dynamics of marriage structure secular political dichotomies; among them, marriage explains unequal relations in contracts, the right of resistance, for example, and more abstract questions of freedom and autonomy. As Grotius’s work had considerable influence on international law, Achinstein provides an impressive discussion of the manner in which conjugal power dynamics structure the framework for colonial law.

Sharon Achinstein is Sir William Osler Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. She is currently working on a book on literature and human rights in early modernity and a scholarly edition of John Milton’s writings on divorce.

The JHI Blog extends its deepest congratulations to Professor Achinstein.

Categories
News and Events

Intellectual History News and Events

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.

Categories
News and Events

Intellectual History News and Events

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.

We encourage our readers to send us information and updates about any news or events that fits within this scope. You can use this form to let us know about something you’d like us to publicize.


Lecture: “Castration Fever: On Trans, Body, and Psychoanalysis in Modern China,” (Howard Chiang, UC Davis)

Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago

This lecture considers the evolution of the speaker’s research over the last 15 years in which the treatment of castration as a historical problem holds promise for bridging disparate scholarly fields and paradigms.

Monday, May 10, 5:00pm CDT. Registration.

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Public Conversation: David Runciman and Pankaj Mishra on Histories of Ideas

London Review of Books

To mark the conclusion of the second series of the podcast Talking Politics: History of Ideas, David Runciman will be joined by Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger and Bland Fanatics, for a conversation about those subjects of David’s that Pankaj has also written about extensively – including Gandhi, Rousseau and Nietzsche – alongside an alternative canon of non-Western theorists of politics and crisis.

Tuesday, 11 May, 7 p.m. UK Time. Registration.

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Public Conversation: Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Stuart Hall’s Selected Writings on Race and Difference

Theory from the Margins

In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora.

Thursday, May 13 at 8 AM CDT. Link.

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Book Launch: Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University, by Reinhold Martin

Heyman Center at Columbia University

Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld.

Friday, May 14, 1:00pm EDT. Registration.

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Conference: Global Early Modern Formations of Race and Their Afterlives

Cornell University

This event will examine early modern formations of race and their enduring presence in the contemporary world. While the intertwined operations of settler colonialism and the mass enslavement of Africans still shape the experiences of Indigenous people and those of the African diaspora today, so do the multiple historical and present-day resistances to these actions.

Friday, May 14, 4-6pm EDT & Saturday, May 15, 1-3pm EDT. Link.

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Lecture: Undisciplining (Environmental) Humanities: Collective Reconstruction of the Histroy of the Gulf of California, Mexico (Micheline Cariño Olvera)

KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory

The EHL have been Undisciplining the Environmental Humanities since 2011. But what do we and others mean when we use the expression? Join us in this series of seminars, as we meet to discuss this and to share experiences from our undisciplining practices around the world.

Friday, May 14, 2021 at 11 AM CDT. Link

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Lecture: “The Workers’ University: Defending Social Care” (Damir Arsenijevic)

KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory

Monday, May 17, 11 am CEST. Link

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Public Conversation: History After Hours: Podcasting the Past, with Averill Earls (DIG Podcast) and Professor Jarett Henderson

UC Santa Barbara History Department

History After Hours is an hour-long Zoom conversation designed to provide alternative forms of learning and enrichment to undergraduate students by focusing on the opportunities that exist (both on and off-campus) to hone their skills as historians in training (History majors, minors, and the History curious are all welcome).

Tuesday, May 18, 4:00 PM PDT. Link.

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Lecture: Art Talk Live: “Reframing the Tianlongshan Cave Temple Fragments,” (Sarah Laursen, Harvard Art Museums)

Harvard Art Museums

In 1943, the museum was gifted 25 stone fragments from the Tianlongshan cave temples in China’s northern Shanxi province. Beginning in the late 1920s, the reliefs and sculptures were removed from the site and published by art dealer Sadajirō Yamanaka, sparking interest among collectors worldwide. This talk will highlight a collaboration with Harvard students that investigates the creation of the works, their meaning in Buddhist medieval China, their sale and journey to their current home, and the ravaged site they left behind.

Tuesday, May 18, 12:30 PM EDT – 1 PM EDT. Registration.

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Lecture: “Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities” (Merve Emre, Oxford University)

Dahlem Humanities Center, Free University Berlin

Post-Discipline asks how (and if) literary scholars should think with and against the innovators of the professional-managerial classes and their deterritorialization of literary pedagogy. Emre’s talk provides an overview of both halves of her book. The first half interrogates why and how narrative fiction is used in schools of professional education to cultivate virtues like leadership, empathy, and judiciousness. The second half imagines how earlier myths and models of literary study, which institute the study of comparative philology, grammar, and taste-making as part of literary professionalization and pedagogy, might point us toward different futures for the discipline

Wednesday, May 19, 06:15 PM CET. Registration.

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Book Launch: “Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought,” by Tae-Yeoun Keum (UC Santa Barbara)

Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UC Santa Barbara

Tae-Yeoun Keum argues that myth is neither irrelevant nor inimical to the ideal of rational progress. She tracks the influence of Plato’s dialogues through the early modern period and on to the twentieth century, showing how pivotal figures in the history of political thought—More, Bacon, Leibniz, the German Idealists, Cassirer, and others—have been inspired by Plato’s mythmaking. She finds that Plato’s followers perennially raised the possibility that there is a vital role for myth in rational political thinking.

Thursday, May 20, 4:00-4:45 pm PST. Registration.

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Conference: Political Concepts: Graduate Student Edition

Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University

The Spring 2021 edition of Political Concepts at Brown invites the featured graduate speakers and the conference participants more broadly to generate and rethink concepts from the positions of the student. The conference addresses a moment of crisis indicated in the U.S. by the failure to contain the coronavirus pandemic, sustained state violence against Black Americans, and increasingly active White supremacist movements. Proposed as early as April of last year, all the concepts to be discussed from across the humanities and social sciences link the structural conditions of, as well as the persistence of popular resistance to, this crisis.

May 20-22, 11:00 am – 3:00 pm EDT. Registration.


Featured Image: Boris Kustodiev, 1926. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Categories
News and Events

Intellectual History News and Events

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.

We encourage our readers to send us information and updates about any news or events that fits within this scope. You can use this form to let us know about something you’d like us to publicize.


Public Conversation: Sensoriality and Kinship in Prison Lifeworlds: A Conversation with Mahuya Bandyopadhyay and Vijay Raghavan

Carceral Imaginary Working Group at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University

Two scholars who have worked in prison spaces in India for decades reflect on how these de-humanizing spaces hold up what it means to be human.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 – 9:30am to 11:00am EST. Registration.

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Symposium: Reconfiguring Histories Symposium

Harvard Graduate School of Design; Harvard Indigenous Design Collective

This symposium initiates critical conversations between artists, activists, and scholars working on museum discourse related to institutionalized knowledge with a focus on provenance, narrative, decolonial curatorial praxis, and community engagement.

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 at 12 PM EDT. Registration.

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Conference: On the Possibility and Impossibility of Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism, Panel: “Colonial Reckoning”

Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University

Cresa Pugh (Harvard University) “The Afterlife of Cultural Death: On the Promise of Restitution for the Benin Bronzes” Lyndsey Beutin (McMaster University) “’Slavery in Africa’ and Other Tired Tropes: How Anti-trafficking Rhetoric Undermines Reparations Organizing”
Roseline Armange (University of Michigan) “Racial Terminology, Positionality, and Reparations in the Francophone Caribbean”
Discussant: Laura Bini Carter (GC, CUNY)

Wednesday April 28th; 1-3pm EDT. Registration.

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Lecture: “The Unforgiven: Wagner, Jews, and Antisemitism” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker)

Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, Yale Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Whitney Humanities Center.

Wednesday, April 28, 5 pm EST. Registration.

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Lecture: “The Critical Posthumanities,” (Rose Braidotti, Utrecht University)

Center for Culture and Technology, University of Southern Denmark; Danish Institute for Advanced Study

Thursday, April 29 at 12 PM EDT – 2 PM CEST. Registration.

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Lecture: Lefler Lecture, “Voices of the Enslaved” (Sophie White, University of Notre Dame)

Carleton University

Professor White’s newest book, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 2019) foregrounds an exceptional set of source material about slavery in French America: court cases in which enslaved individuals testified and in the process produced riveting autobiographical narratives.

Tuesday, May 4, 12:25 – 1:25 pm, EDT. Registration.

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Public Conversation: “Sacralizing Money,” with Eugene McCarraher, Bethany Moreton, Devin Singh, Russell Muirhead and Amy Schiller

The Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College

Participants explore different perspectives on the presence of intimacy, virtue, and mysticism in financial transactions, and the ramifications of a more expansive framework for money amidst upheaval in the capitalist and neoliberal regimes.

Wednesday, May 5, 4:00–6:00pm EDT. Link.

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Public Conversation: Thinking Women: New Books Series
Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought” by Durba Mitra, moderated by Anjali Arondekar

University of California, Irvine School of the Humanities

Wednesday, May 5, 12:00-1:00pm PDT. Registration.

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Lecture: “Fantasizing Racism” (Todd McGowan, University of Vermont)

The Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College

In this talk, McGowan will argue for the enduring relevance of the psychoanalytic logic of fantasy for antiracist critical practice.

Thursday, May 6, 4:00 – 5:15pm EDT. Registration.


Featured Image: Paul Signac, Still Life with a Book. 1883. Courtesy of Wikiart.

Categories
News and Events

Intellectual History News and Events

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.

We encourage our readers to send us information and updates about any news or events that fits within this scope. You can use this form to let us know about something you’d like us to publicize.


Lecture: “A Temporal Turn: Rethinking German-Jewish Intellectual History with Buber, Benjamin, Arendt, and Celan” (Nitzan Lebovic, Lehigh University)
Commentator: Benjamin Pollock

The Richard Koebner Center for German History, Hebrew University

A German Jewish Time tells the story of a group of twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals who grappled ceaselessly with concepts of time and temporality. The project brings into dialogue key thinkers, including the philosopher of religion Martin Buber, the critical theorist Walter Benjamin, the political scientist Hannah Arendt, and the poet Paul Celan, who stand at the center of our contemporary understanding of religion, critical theory, politics, and literature.

Sunday, April 11, 2021, 18:30-20:00 in Israel. Link for Event.

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Conference: A (Virtual) Conversation on the Plantationocene

Cross-Border Movements Program on Migrations at Cornell University, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Cornell’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

This set of virtual panels brings together a diverse group of scholars, activists, and practitioners to discuss the role that plantations and plantation agriculture have played in shaping the nature, structure and dynamics of the modern era.

Thursday, April 15, 2021 More dates through April 16. Registration.

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Lecture: “Jackie Kay’s Intermedial Poetics – Disjunctive Connectivity and Plural Identities” (Prof. Dr. Birgit Neumann, Heinrich Heine University of Duesseldorf)

Vrije Universiteit Brussel Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Thursday 22 April 2021 09:00h – 10:30h (Brussels). Registration.

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Lecture: “Social Networks of the Past. Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Modernity through Literary Translation in Periodicals” (Laura Fólica, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)

Vrije Universiteit Brussel Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Monday 17 May, 11-12:30 (Brussels). Registration.

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Call for Papers: Connections: A Journal of Language, Media, and Culture

Connections: A Journal of Language, Media, and Culture invites high-quality research submissions for their 2021 publication. Connections is committed to elevating and supporting graduate-level and early-career research from interdisciplinary subject areas. Our second issue will center on the theme of building bridges: maintaining connections found at the heart of cultural, multimedia, textual, or language-based interactions in times of crisis. Building bridges in times of crisis may look like community-building, resilience, protest, growth, or care work. We hope this theme will allow for nuanced interpretation.

Please submit before May 15, 2021.

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Call for Papers: Massachusetts Historical Review: Representation in American History

Interested parties should submit a current curriculum vitae along with a one-page (double-spaced) proposal that outlines the subject the author seeks to pursue and its connection to the theme, the sources employed, and the intervention in relevant historical scholarship to mhr@masshist.org by June 15, 2021. By July 15, 2021, authors with successful proposals will receive an invitation to submit a completed draft of their essay for consideration. First drafts of essays selected will be due by December 1, 2021, and must be 7,500–10,000 words. All drafts will undergo a rigorous peer-review process by both MHS staff and outside readers prior to publication.

Due by June 15


Featured Image: Mary Cassatt, Reading the Newspaper, No.2. c. 1883. Courtesy of the Art Institute Chicago.

Categories
News and Events

Intellectual History News and Events

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.

We encourage our readers to send us information and updates about any news or events that fits within this scope. You can use this form to let us know about something you’d like us to publicize.


Webinar: “Black and Indigenous Futures”

Organized by the Society of Black Archaeologists
April 7th, 2021, at 4:00pm – 6:00pm EDT

In this final webinar of the series, archaeologists, artists, and cultural theorists turn to questions of what’s next in the struggle for the recognition and promotion of Indigenous and Black life. They ask: How can archaeology, the study of material worlds past and present, help construct new futures? This work will include recognizing the ongoing experiences of cultural genocide and how to sustain ancestral homelands while cultivating new ones for diasporas always in the making. We will explore the intersection of Black and Indigenous communities in the continued fight for justice.

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Lecture: “Fanon on the Matter of Breathing,” Achille Mbembe (WiSER, Wits University)

Wednesday, April 7, 6PM (Johannesburg time)

From February to October of 2021, WiSER’s PUBLIC POSITIONS Series will present ten public thematic dialogues on the new generation of Fanon studies. Particular emphasis will be placed on the political and the clinical, the close communication between the two, how they impact upon one another and are at times mistaken for each other. Speakers are invited to develop one or more arguments for 20 minutes each. This will be followed by a dialogue led by Professor Achille Mbembe before the session is opened to a broader audience.

Registration here.

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CfP: “Narratives of Temporality: Continuities, Discontinuities, Ruptures”

Conference organised by the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, to take place July 24-25, 2021 at Cambridge/Online.

The aim of this conference is to develop a multidisciplinary reflection on the complex relationship between narrative and temporality. The central topics concern the multiple and articulated ways in which narrative practices and forms of temporality dynamically interact, by developing a multifaceted space of concepts, theories, practices and knowledge, in a dynamics of cross-disciplinary thinking. Full CfP here.

Proposals up to 250 words should be sent by April 30, 2021 to spatiality.temporality@lcir.co.uk.

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CfP: “Plague, politics, and portents,” Ars Longa Journal

Ars Longa is a new, independent online journal and blog dedicated to Early Modern art and visual/material culture. The aim is to create an open-access, creative platform where early career scholars and advanced graduate students can share their research and current projects. For our inaugural issue, we welcome submissions related—but not limited—to the following topics: epidemics, plagues, and sickness; prophesies, omens and portents; marvels, wonders, and prodigies; eschatology; flood, famine, and other natural disasters; memento mori, memorials, and mourning; political upheaval, uprisings, revolts, and war. Read the full call here.

For consideration, please send your abstract (250 words) along with a CV to arslongajournal at gmail.com by April 15, 2021.

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CfP: “Liberalism and/or socialism: tensions, exchanges and convergences from the 19th century to today”

Conference organized by the University of Lorraine – Nancy (France), to take place October 21–22, 2021.

This conference aims at reevaluating the relationship between two major ideologies—liberalism and socialism—which seem to be contested nowadays, exploring the forms they have taken and tracing their development from their rise in the 19th century onward. Papers that address the interactions between socialism and liberalism in the English-speaking world (Ireland, UK, US etc.) , in the fields of intellectual history, the history of political and economic thought, economic and political history are welcome. Read the full call here.

Proposals (300 words max) and a short biography should be sent to liberalism.socialism.conference@gmail.com and stephane.guy@univ-lorraine.fr by May 10, 2021.

CfP: “Dynamic Encounters between Buddhism and the West”
University of Cambridge Postgraduate Online Conference 21-22 June 2021


This conference seeks to explore historical and contemporary dialogues between Buddhism and the West, while also contemplating ways of opening up new conversations. With an appreciation of the value of interdisciplinarity, we aim to bring together scholars from diverse fields to both share and enhance their unique perspectives. In today’s era of globalisation, dialogue between different cultures is a daily occurrence. The last century in particular has produced a dynamic exchange of ideas between Buddhism and the West. Important exchanges have occurred in myriad areas of intellectual life, ranging from spiritual endeavours to the pursuit of a scientific understanding of the mind.

Please send abstract (500 words) and CV to: dynamicencounters2021@gmail.com by 9 May 2021.


Featured Image: Rik Wouters, “Woman in Black Reading a Newspaper,” 1912.