Sensing and Feeling: The Embodiment of Experience in the Eighteenth Century
The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University is pleased to announce the sixth Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop, to be held on May 23-26, 2007. The workshop is part of a series of annual interdisciplinary events that has been running since 2002, with 20-30 scholars presenting and discussing pre-circulated papers on a broad topic in a congenial setting.
Our topic for 2007 is "Sensing and Feeling: The embodiment of experience in the eighteenth century". Connecting mental and social practices to bodily sensation became crucial in many different venues during the eighteenth century. How were cognition, experience, and feelings understood to be linked to the body? What were the mediations between the sensorium and religious, social, and political practices?
Our aim is to go beyond the Foucauldian notion that the body is above all a medium of power - suffering its consequences or heroically offering resistance to it. We seek to provide a more nuanced perspective on the body by investigating sensation, embodiment, and the connections between them, at the levels both of experience and of conceptualization of experience. How did understandings of the embodiment of cognition and affect shift over time? What sort of social and psychological practices were enabled by thinking of the senses in certain ways? How, in turn, did these practices prompt a rethinking of the nexus of psychic and physiological realities? And how did representational practices (visual, musical, textual, scientific, dramatic, etc.) respond to such shifts?
Papers might address topics such as:
The workshop format will consist of focused discussion of four to six pre-circulated papers a day, amid socializing and refreshment. The workshop will draw both on the wide community of eighteenth-century scholars and on the large and growing group of scholars in this field at Indiana University-Bloomington. The workshop will cover most expenses of those scholars chosen to present their work: accommodations, travel (up to a certain limit), and most meals.
We are asking for applications to be sent to us by Monday, 8th January 2007. The application consists of a two-page description of the proposed paper as well as a current cv. Please email or send your application to Dr. Barbara Truesdell, Weatherly Hall North, room 122, Bloomington, IN 47405, Telephone 812/855-2856, email voltaire@indiana.edu. Papers will be selected by an interdisciplinary committee.
For further information please contact the director of the Center, Dror Wahrman, Dept. of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, e-mail dwahrman@indiana.edu.