Call for papers
UPDATE
IMAGINING THE CITY
International interdisciplinary conference to be held at St John’s College,
Cambridge, 30 July-2 August 2004.
Keynote Speakers
Peter Burke (Cambridge) – Susanne Hauser (Graz) – Nigel Thrift (Oxford)
The organisers have already received offers on topics which range from Eastern
Europe to Manhattan and Hollywood, from early post-Roman Europe to
contemporary Berlin, and they would welcome further offers which would make it
possible to compare the ways in which cities have been imagined from a wide
variety of historical and methodological perspectives.
Purpose
Urban culture, its impact on the creative imagination, and the representation
of both individual cities and the general nature of life in cities have
provided a rich seam of inquiry in recent years for those who work in literary
and cultural studies as well as in sociology, geography, and architectural
history. The purpose of the conference is to provide a forum for experts in
these fields to compare notes on the role of the imagination in conceiving the
city as a symbolic place for the intersection of historical and cultural
identities, and in representing the city through the media of literature, art,
film and performance. The organisers are keen to develop a programme which
will look beyond the familiar images of cities in antiquity, the Renaissance,
the industrial and the post-industrial world, and focus rather on such aspects
of the city as the following:
- the city as a place of utopia, dystopia and myth
- the cultural effects of the social, political and spatial organisation of
the city
- the city as a historical and/or symbolic space for the formation of the
political imaginary
- the relation between the human and the technical in urban space
- the role of time, emotion and affect in the city
- scenes of cultural exchange and intercultural tension
Proposals
Please send your proposal (title and short summary of content) by Friday 16
January 2004 to either of the following:
Dr David Midgley
Director of Studies in Modern Languages
St John’s CollegeCambridge CB2 1TP
United Kingdom
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Dr Christian Emden
Assistant Professor of German
Department of German and Slavic Studies
Rice University
Houston, TX 77005-1892
USA
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Papers may be in English, German or French. The organisers expect to publish a
selection of the papers in a volume or volumes designed to exemplify current
thinking on the issues concerned in the series Cultural History and Literary
Imagination, published by Peter Lang, of which they are the editors. Further
information on this series and the activities associated with it can be found
on the following website:
http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/german/researchgroup/intro.html
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