CALL FOR PAPERS (DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION 14 JULY 2013)

CfP_Leiden_Conference

International Conference:
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philological Encounters
5 – 7 June 2014, Leiden (NL)

The research program 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, invite papers for their joint international conference
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philological Encounters which will take place
at the University of Leiden, 5-7 June 2014.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philological Encounters

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).

Contact

ZUKUNFTSPHILOLOGIE
c/o Forum Transregionale Studien
Wallotstrasse 14
14193 Berlin
Germany
zukunftsphilologie@trafo-berlin.de

 

 

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