Organizers: Beth Plummer (University of Arizona), Ute Lotz-Heumann (University of Arizona), and Carina L. Johnson (Pitzer College)

Co-Sponsors: Duke University; The American Friends of the Herzog August Bibliothek (AFHAB); and The Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, University of Arizona

The Ninth International Conference takes as its theme Sharing Spaces: Cultural and Spatial Interactions within and beyond German-Speaking Europe. This theme stands as an invitation to engage with recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the spatial turn, entanglements, interconfessionality, and the movement of people, ideas, objects, and commercial goods.

Sharing Spaces opens up new ways of understanding social, cultural, political, and intellectual interactions within German-speaking Central Europe and between these regions and other parts of Europe and the world during the early modern era. Even as people created real and imaginary walls and boundaries, they also continued to interact with others outside of those boundaries in shared social and cultural spaces. Different ideas, religions, classes, genders, emerging ethnicities or nationalities, and linguistic groups came into contact, opposition, conflict, exchange, and accommodation in unexpected and transformative ways. In this sense, Sharing Spaces goes beyond the concept of “spaces” as simply physical to encompass all sites and forms of generative or consequential encounter.

Potential topics could include:
- Sharing the natural world
- Experiences in and reactions to shared spaces
- Social and economic interactions
- Sharing of ideas, knowledge, and imagined spaces
- Cultural juxtapositions and blending in art, literature, music
- Sharing material culture, objects, and commercial goods
- Sharing ritual, religious, and social spaces
- Sharing and contesting public spaces

Abstract submission
Group proposals as well as individual submissions are welcome, but please bear in mind the conference’s essential interdisciplinary objective when proposing panels (three papers and a chair or moderator). Papers may be in English or German. Some travel support will be available for graduate students.

Please send your contact information, a brief bio, title, and abstract of no more than 250 words per paper to fni@arizona.edu. All other queries can be addressed to meplummer@arizona.edu, ulotzh@arizona.edu, and carina_johnson@pitzer.edu. Deadline for submission: 1 September 2022.