Call for Papers and Panels

The Making of the Humanities VI

University of Oxford, Somerville College, UK

September 28-30, 2017

The sixth conference on the history of the humanities, ‘The Making of the Humanities VI’, will take place at the University of Oxford, Humanities Division and Somerville College, UK, from 28 till 30 September 2017.

Goal of the Making of the Humanities (MoH) Conferences

The MoH conferences are organized by the Society for the History of the Humanities and bring together scholars and historians interested in the history of a wide variety of disciplines, including archaeology, art history, historiography, linguistics, literary studies, media studies, musicology, and philology, tracing these fields from their earliest developments to the modern day.

We welcome panels and papers on any period or region. We are especially interested in work that transcends the history of specific humanities disciplines by comparing scholarly practices across disciplines and civilisations. Graduate students are encouraged to submit papers, which, when accepted, will compete for the annual Best Graduate Student Paper Award.

Please note that the Making of the Humanities conferences are not concerned with the history of art, the history of music or the history of literature, and so on, but instead with the history of art history, the history of musicology, the history of literary studies, etc.

Keynote Speakers

Elisabeth Décultot, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg: From an Antiquarian to an Historical Approach? The Birth of Art History in the 18th Century

Shamil Jeppie, University of Cape Town: Styles of Writing History in Timbuktu and the Sahara/Sahel

Peter Mandler, University of Cambridge: The Rise (and Fall?) of the Humanities

Paper Submissions

Abstracts of single papers (30 minutes including discussion) should contain the name of the speaker, full contact address (including email address), the title and a summary of the paper of maximally 250 words. For more information about submitting abstracts, see the submission page.

Deadline for abstracts: 15 April 2017

Notification of acceptance: June 2017

Panel Submissions

Panels last 1.5 to 2 hours and can consist of 3-4 papers and possibly a commentary on a coherent theme including discussion. Panel proposals should contain respectively the name of the chair, the names of the speakers and commentator, full contact addresses (including email addresses), the title of the panel, a short (150 words) description of the panel’s content and for each paper an abstract of maximally 250 words. For more information about submitting panels, see the submission page.

Deadline for panel proposals: 15 April 2017

Notification of acceptance: June 2017

 MoH International Committee

Rens Bod (U. of Amsterdam), Christopher Celenza (JHU), Hent de Vries (JHU), Julia Kursell (U. of Amsterdam), Fenrong Liu (Tsinghua U.), Jaap Maat (U. of Amsterdam), Helen Small (U. of Oxford), Thijs Weststeijn (Utrecht U.)

 

The Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences (University of Amsterdam) invites applications for short-term Research Fellowships in the History of Humanities and/or the History of Science. Applicants are invited to submit a proposal for obtaining a subsidy for research fellowships. More information can be found at the following website.

For general information on the Vossius Center please click here.

The Fall 2016 issue of History of Humanities can be found online here. This issue features contributions by  Shamil Jeppie, ‘Timbuktu Scholarship: But What Did They Read?’, Sara Gonzalez, ‘Writing Pre-Hispanic History in Viceregal Peru: The Dynastic Iconography of the Inca Kings’, Michiel Leezenberg, ‘The Vernacular Revolution: Reclaiming Early Modern Grammatical Traditions in the Ottoman Empire’,
Floris Solleveld, ‘How to Make a Revolution: Revolutionary Rhetoric in the European Humanities around 1800’, Boris Gasparov, ‘Between Methodological Strictness and Moral Appeal: Questions of Language and Cultural Theory in Russia’, a Forum section ‘The Scholarly Self’ with 4 contributions and a commentary and a section with book reviews. Enjoy!

We can look back on a highly successful fifth Making of Humanities Conference, held in Baltimore, 5-7 October 2016. For the first time a conference in this series was held in the United States at the splendid venue of John Hopkins University. The number of participants vastly increased till around 150, leading to a conference of three days, packed with parallel sessions and three keynote lectures.

We thank all speakers at the conference for their contributions. We also thank the local organizers for letting things run so smoothly. Especially the reception at the beautiful Peabody library was an event to remember. For an extended conference report by Floris Solleveld please click here.

For the first time this year a prize of $500 was awarded for the best Graduate Student paper. This prize was won by Katharina Isabel Schmidt for her paper entitled “From Evolutionary Functionalism to Critical Transnationalism. Comparative Legal History 1780s to Present.” As part of the prize, she will be offered the opportunity to publish her paper in the journal History of Humanities next year.

We encourage other participants as well to submit papers, presented at the conference, to our journal. Looking forward to 2017 we are happy to announce date and venue for The Making of Humanities VI conference: it will be held in Oxford (UK), Somerville College, from 28-30 September. Hope to see you all there!