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?
Participants include:
Leora Auslander (History, Chicago): The Politics of Habit: Ambiguities of the Body in Eighteenth-Century Revolutionary Theory and Practice
Samuel Breene (Music, Duke): The Eighteenth-Century Body: Science, Aesthetics, and Performances of the Self
Michel Chaouli (Germanic Studies, Indiana): The Haptic Enlightenment
Tita Chico (English, Univ. of Maryland-College Park): “A New Sense”: Bodies, Taste, and Optical Instruments in the Eighteenth Century
Veit Erlmann (Music, Univ. of Texas at Austin): Good Vibes: Nerves, Air and Compulsive Listening in the French Enlightenment
Kevis Goodman (English, Berkeley): The “Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia as a Sensuous Science of History
Amit Hagar (History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana): Thomas Reid and the Language of Nature: Semiotics, Relationalism, and Mediated Perception
Vladimir Jankovic (History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Manchester): Rationalizing Delicacy: The Spaces of Vulnerability, Discomfort, and Pathological Conviviality in late-Enlightenment England
Oscar Kenshur (Comparative Literature, Indiana): The Discourse on Taste and the Ideologies of the Senses
Margaret Kohler (English, Otterbein College): Multiple Sensory Modalities of Attention in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry
Chad Luck (English, Indiana): Walking the Property: Edgar Huntly, David Hume, and the Phenomenology of Possession
Eyal Peretz (Comparative Literature, Indiana): Common Sense and Paradox
Jessica Riskin (History, Stanford): The Divine Optician
Michael Sauter (History, CIDE, Mexico): Germans in Space: Astronomy, Orientation, and Anthropologie in the Eighteenth Century
Helmut Schneider (Germanic Studies, Bonn): Humanity’s Imaginary Body: The Concepts of Empathy and Sympathy and the New Theater Experience in the Eighteenth Century
Liana Vardi (History, Buffalo): Economists and the Senses in the Late French Enlightenment
Anne Vila (French and Italian, Wisconsin-Madison): Penser par le ventre: The Gastric Embodiment of Thought and Feeling in Eighteenth-Century France
Christian Weber (Germanic Studies, Indiana): The Eye’s Imagination (Or: how the history of the world is inscribed on the globes of the eyes)
Lisa Zunshine (English, Kentucky): Fictions of Transparency: Introducing Theory of Mind into Eighteenth-Century Studies
The workshop format will consist of focused discussion of four to six pre-circulated papers a day, amid socializing and refreshment. To register for the Workshop, please contact Dr. Barbara Truesdell, Weatherly Hall North, room 122, Bloomington, IN 47405, Telephone 812/855-2856, email voltaire@indiana.edu.
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.