Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The Cultural History of Emotions in Pre-Modernity II

Call For Papers
The Cultural History of Emotions in Pre-modernity II
Emotions East and West
İstanbul, Sept. 29-Oct. 01, 2011
Building on the momentum of the successful 2008 workshop held at Umeå University in Sweden, a new conference on the cultural history of emotions is now being organized, this time in İstanbul, Turkey. Developed jointly by historians at Sabancı University (İstanbul), Bilkent University (Ankara), University of Washington (Seattle) and the Network for Cultural History of Emotions in Pre-modernity (CHEP) at Umeå University, the program will run over three days and include six invited keynote talks and a full calendar of talks by established scholars, post-graduates and advanced graduate students in the arts and humanities, in addition to providing opportunities to sample life in one of the world’s most fascinating cities.
The conference’s general theme is Emotions in East and West. So far the history of emotions has been dominated by a western and European perspective. Our aim is to organize a first conference on this theme in Turkey which we hope will attract new scholars and students into the field and bring researchers from east and west together for discussions on how to develop comparative and multicultural analyses in the future. We welcome contributions on all aspects of the cultural history of emotions from as many disciplines and diverse approaches as possible, including (but not limited to) history, the history of ideas, art, literature, musicology, politics, philosophy, cultural anthropology, religion, and gender studies. The conference will continue to explore the broad themes of the Umeå gathering: for example, emotions as a historical concept, emotions in religious and political contexts, visual representations of emotions and emotional gestures, the language of emotions and its literary manifestations, music and emotions, the gendering of emotions, sensibility, sentimentalism, love, melancholy, and despair. In addition we will especially welcome papers dealing with inter-cultural representations of emotions (Easterners and Westerners representing each other’s emotions), emotions and cultural identities, multi-cultural and comparative perspectives.
The organizing committee is inviting submissions of one-page abstracts of papers to be summarized as 20 minute talks at the İstanbul conference. The papers should, in general, treat the topic of the history of emotions in the pre-modern period. For the Umeå workshop the “pre-modern period” was presumed to end at the turn of the 18th century, which is acceptable from a strictly western perspective but questionable when the focus of the conference broadens to take in the East, where the nature of “modernity” and the broad moment of its inception are contentious issues. Accordingly, papers dealing with non-western emotions in the 18th century (and even later) will be considered when a compelling argument is made for the “pre-modernity” of the emotional context. The language of the Conference is English.
Please send one-page abstracts before Dec. 01 2010, to: chep2011@bilkent.edu.tr
Conference website: http://www.chep2011.bilkent.edu.tr/
Conference Organizers:
Walter G. Andrews, University of Washington
Tülay Artan, Sabancı University
Mohammad Fazlhashemi, Umeå University, CHEP
Mehmet Kalpaklı, Bilkent University
Jonas Liliequist, Umeå University, CHEP