Imagining Death and the Afterlife in the Middle East (c. 500-1800 CE)
Middle East Association (MESA) Annual Meeting 2014
Washington, DC, 22-25 November 2014
Organizers:
Patricia Blessing and Ali Yaycioglu
Abstract are requested for a panel on Imagining Death and the
Afterlife in the Middle East (c. 500-1800 CE).
Please send a 300-400 word abstract and a CV to [log in to unmask]
by January 15, 2014.
Authors of selected papers will be notified by January 25, 2014 and
will have until February 15, 2014 to upload their abstract on the
Middle East Studies Association's conference website. MESA membership
is required to submit an abstract to the MESA online system. The MESA
program committee will decide on the acceptance of the entire panel.
For more information on the conference, see:
http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/annual-meeting/index.html
Imagining Death and the Afterlife in the Middle East (c. 500-1800 CE)
This panel brings together papers that investigate representations of
death and the afterlife in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Central
Asia. The focus of papers may lie on any pre-modern context from late
antiquity to the early 19th century. Studies in history, religious
studies, art history, and anthropology are all equally welcome in a
panel that aims to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue around the
theme of death and the afterlife, beyond our modern understanding and
practices of dying. Relevant topics might include perceptions,
conceptions, descriptions, and representations of death and the
afterlife in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim contexts; funerary rituals
and practices and displays of mourning; preservation of memory through
the construction of shrines for rulers, the rich, and saints; urban
space and cemeteries; pilgrimage and the use of relics; being unable
to die (e.g. vampires); inheritance and its recording; disease and
executions; and theological discussions of death and the afterlife.
Papers may work with any combination of textual or material sources,
ranging from elegies, funerary litanies, gravestones, foundation
documents, and hagiographies to architecture, paintings, and textiles.
At the theoretical level, work on death, burial, and relics in Islam
(Leor Halevi, Brannon Wheeler), on the body in late antique and
medieval Christianity (Peter Brown, Caroline Walker Bynum), and on
shrines and pilgrimage (Pedram Khosronejad, Joseph Meri) are relevant
points of comparison and methodological entry points.
Organizers:
Patricia Blessing, PhD
Stanford Humanities Center
Stanford University
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Ali Yaycioglu, PhD
Assistant Professor of History
History Department
Stanford University
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