The ISECS International Congress on Enlightenment will be held in Edinburgh on July 14–19, 2019. Historians of Russian and European Enlightenment, we would like to seize this opportunity to engage in a diachronic and transnational discussion of discourses and practices that have shaped and currently shape the overarching label “Enlightenment.”
“Diachronic” refers to our intention to situate our collective enquiry in both eighteenth-century and more recent debates, from Adorno, Horkheimer, and Foucault to Israel and postcolonial critique. “Transnational” refers to our belief that the circulation of texts and practices, with the translations and appropriations that this motion involves, contributes to the articulation and realisation of the phenomenon of Enlightenment, rather than to its deformation and spoliation. Quite naturally, this notion also invites a scrutinisation of the global dynamics of the Enlightenment.
This being said, our main focus will be on institutions in which knowledge practices were deployed with the objective of governing, and on the discourses that both legitimised these institutions and grounded the alliance of knowledge and power. This part of the investigation won’t be limited to academia, universities, and learned societies, insofar as knowledge production and circulation became a major concern of power agents in a variety of spheres. We will therefore avoid preconceived distinctions between objects of research that fall in the domain of history of science or of art history. In a similar vein, the panels will aim at establishing a productive dialogue between social history and the history of ideas.
Many brilliant essays have been written in order to critically reassess the Enlightenment narrative (see bibliography below); it would be too ambitious to outline an original perspective in a couple of paragraphs. A short declaration of intent would, on the other hand, be helpful. We would like to address a set of questions that are arguably relevant for academics in the early 21st century, but we wish to do so without separating intellectual and activist agendas beforehand. A round table on tolerance that took place at the BSECS annual conference in 2016 (https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/tolerance-and-combat/) is a good example of a successful debate of this kind. When it comes to identities, it is of particular interest to us to discuss how the Enlightenment narrative contributed to establishing and perpetuating the idea of politically autonomous knowledge circulating in the sciences and the arts — an idea that contemporary universities in particular are often kept hostages of.
To submit a paper proposal, please send it to alexei.evstratov@unil.ch. The deadline for proposal submissions is January 26, 2019. Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract of max. 500 words, and a brief biography. We will ask our delegates to submit papers (max. 4000 words) in time to be be circulated in advance.
We will review proposals very promptly and will get back to you by 28 January at latest. The final deadline for submission of papers and panel proposals through to the ISECS is February 1, 2019, which means that if we do not include your paper in our panels, you will have time to submit it independently.
NB: Please keep in mind that all bursary applications are to be submitted individually by January 31, 2019. Also be aware that you may give only one paper. You may in addition appear on roundtables, act as a panel respondent, and chair a panel. For more details, see the Congress webpage https://www.bsecs.org.uk/isecs/en/cfp/
Selected references
Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002 [1947]).
Sebastian Conrad, Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique, The American Historical Review, Volume 117, Issue 4, 1 October 2012, pp. 999–1027.
Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man. 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Steffen Martus, Aufklärung. Das deutsche 18. Jahrhundert - ein Epochenbild (Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, 2015).
Andreas Pečar, Damien Tricoire, Falsche Freunde. War die Aufklärung wirklich die Geburtsstunde der Moderne? (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 2015).
What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).