Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philological Encounters

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philological Encounters

Veranstalter
Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship (Forum Transregionale Studien/Berlin) and the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS), in cooperation with Leiden University Library
Veranstaltungsort
University of Leiden
Ort
Leiden
Land
Netherlands
Vom - Bis
05.06.2014 - 07.06.2014
Deadline
14.07.2013
Website
Von
Islam Dayeh, Zukunftsphilologie, Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School, Freie Universitaet Berlin

Convened by Islam Dayeh (Zukunftsphilologie/Freie Universität Berlin), Umar Ryad (Leiden University) and Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn (CNRS Paris)

As a result of colonial expansion and the technologies that made long-distance communication and travel possible, the 19th and 20th centuries witnessed an accelerated rate of individual interactions across the globe, including scholarly encounters. Individual scholars became more conscious of the commonalities that they shared with fellow humans all over the world, which they expressed in universalistic projects in philosophy, philology, the life sciences and other fields of human inquiry. Yet the encounter also brought about an articulation of differences. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philological Encounters is a conference dedicated to exploring the personal (and especially self-reflective) dimensions of academic knowledge production by studying scholars (i.e., producers) and their contexts (i.e., institutions and societies) in relation to their objects of study.

Knowledge is always embedded in institutions and is produced by individual scholars whose choices are shaped by their biographies as much as by the subjects they study. Thus, Philological Encounters refers to the discovery of difference that came about due to the real-life encounters between professionals and interpreters of texts, languages and cultures across the globe. This conference outlines an avenue of research dedicated to the study of tensions, antagonisms and polemics – as well as fascination, cooperation, appropriation and friendship – that transpired as a consequence of the meetings of different scholars and their dissimilar modes of textual scholarship, made possible through international cooperation in the form of conferences, journals, academic associations and student exchange.

The conference objective is not hagiography, but rather historicizing seemingly monolithic categories – such as 'orientalism', 'philology' and 'history' – by localizing the role of individual actors in the process of knowledge formation, in the colonial and post-colonial periods. The conference addresses this by looking at first-person accounts of conferences, reports, travel writing, correspondences, memoirs, auto/biographies, polemical essays, and translations, among other writings.

Application

If you are interested in participating, please send us your short CV and a 300 word abstract (sent by e-mail as one pdf file) by 14 July 2013 to zukunftsphilologie@trafo-berlin.de. Accepted proposals will be notified by the end of September 2013. The final date for the submission of the full paper will be 9 March 2014. It is expected that papers will be published in a peer-reviewed edited volume.

For accepted papers, we will be happy to fund your return flight/train (economy class/second class) and your hotel accommodation (from 4 to 7 June 2014).

Programm

Kontakt

Islam Dayeh

Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule, FU Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, Berlin 14195

islam.dayeh@zukunftsphilologie.de