Society for the History of the Humanities

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Call for Papers and Panels ‘The Making of the Humanities IX’, Barcelona

Barcelona, 20-22 September, 2021

UPDATE APRIL 2020: DUE TO COVID-19, THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL 2021. PLEASE CHECK THE NEW DEADLINE BELOW!

‘The Making of the Humanities’ conference goes to Barcelona! The Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) together with the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) will host the 9th Making of the Humanities conference, from 20 till 22 September 2021, at the facilities of the UPF Faculty of Humanities, Ciutadella Campus, Jaume I building.

Barcelona

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 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.

This year there is a special conference theme. We encourage submissions that explore this theme, but remain fully open to submissions addressing other subjects.

This year’s conference theme is Unfolding Disciplines in the History of the Humanities.  

A growing body of scholarship suggests that the historiography of the humanities is increasingly organized around new interdisciplinary collaborations that affect the very understanding of what it means to belong to a Humanities discipline. This year we invite contributions that interlace different disciplinary approaches in order to frame humanistic scholarship in terms of a continued engagement with the limits and possibilities offered by the softening and even erasure of disciplinary boundaries. Participants are also encouraged to think expansively about the impact of the ongoing process of reinvention of established as well as new disciplinary fields as a result of increased cross-pollination and collaboration. 

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 MoH-IX (Preliminary)

Cristina Dondi (Oxford University): “The history of the book and libraries: from bibliophilia to social and economic history”

Maribel Fierro (CCHS-CSIC Madrid): “Iberian humanities and the historical experience of religious pluralism”

Matthew Rampley (Masaryk University): “Naturalistic Theories in the Humanities: Past and Present”

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: 1 May 2021

Notification of acceptance: June 2021

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: 1 May 2021

Notification of acceptance: June 2021

Conference fee

The exact conference fee will be determined in spring 2021 and will be ca. €100 for regular participants and ca. €80 for PhD students. The fee includes access to all sessions, access to the welcoming reception, simple lunches, and tea and/or coffee during the breaks.

Organization

Local Organizing Committee: Daniele Cozzoli (UPF), Linda Gale Jones (UPF), Tomas Macsotay (UPF) and Neus Rotger (UOC)

Program Committee: International Board of the Society

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Final Programme “The Making of the Humanities VIII”

The Making of the Humanities VIII Conference

21-23 November 2019, University of Cape Town

“Decentralizing the History of the Humanities”

Venue: The Huma seminar Room, Neville Alexander Building, Upper Campus,

University of Cape Town

PROGRAM

Day 1, 21 November 2019

8.45-9.15: Registration

9.15-9.30: Opening of the conference by Shamil Jeppie (UCT) and Rens Bod (President of the Society)

9.30-10.30: Keynote Lecture by Elisio Macamo, Centre for African Studies, University of Basel

Unmaking Africa – The Humanities and the study of what?

Chair: Shamil Jeppie, UCT

10.30-11.00: Coffee

11.00-12.30: History of the Humanities in South Africa

Chair: TBA

11.00-11.30: Menan du Plessis, Stellenbosch University

The 19th century rise—and 21st century perpetuation—of Khoisan studies as a compromised field in the context of colonial and post-colonial southern Africa.

11.30-12.00:  Bronwyn Strydom, University of Pretoria

Reflections on writing a centenary history for the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria

12.00-12.30: Reingard Nethersole, University Wits and visiting scholar University of Richmond

Textwebs 1829: Weimar, Capetown, Craigenputtock

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30-15.30: The History of Theory (panel)

Chair: David Shumway, Carnegie Mellon University

Premesh Lalu, University of the Western Cape

The Humanities in the Wake of Slavery

John Higgins, University of Cape Town

The Identity of Theory: Some Observations on Literary Theory in South Africa

Ulrike Kistner, University of Pretoria

(Un)Doing Critical Theory in Pretoria, 1981-1987

David Shumway, Carnegie Mellon University

Theory Journals and the Rise of Theory in Literary Studies in the U.S.

15.30-16.00 Coffee, tea

16.00-18.00: The Arts and Historiography

Chair: Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam

16.00-16.30: Petra van Langen, University of Groningen

Pioneers in musicology. National trends in the development of musicology as an academic discipline.

16.30-17.00: J. Kirk Irwin, The University of Edinburgh

Decentralized Histories of Architectural Space: Panofsky and Le Corbusier

17.00-17.30 : Daniela Merolla, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris

Co-Authorship and Subversion of Humanities: Amazigh/Berber Literary and Historical Studies

17.30-18.00: Maria Teresa Costa, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

The Transnational Formation of Art History through its First International Conferences

18.15-20.00: Reception with finger food at the Irma Stern Museum (http://www.irmastern.co.za/). Shuttle will be provided.

Day 2, 22 November 2019

9.30-10.30: Keynote lecture by Martin Scherzinger, New York University

African Music in the Humanities: A Critique (and a Speculation)

Chair: Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam

10.30-11.00: Coffee

11.00-12.30: History and Ethnography

Chair: Shamil Jeppie, UCT

11.00-11.30: Pieter Francois, University of Oxford

Reassessing the legacies of Henri Berr and Frederick Teggart in the context of the recent turn to global history and cultural evolution.

11.30-12.00: Zehra Tonbul, Istanbul Sehir University

The Web and the Angel of Weltverkehr

12.00-12.30: Eldar Salakhetdinov, Unisa

The Evolution of Khoisan Identity Narrative in South Africa: Discovering National Myth

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30-15.30: The South African academic journal: past, present and future as affective orientations (panel)

Chair: Rory du Plessis, University of Pretoria

Wemar Strydom, NWU

“Past” / Strategic encounters with whiteness: 1989 to 2001 in the Stilet archive

Siseko H. Kumalo, University of Pretoria

“Present” / An instantiation of the Black Archive

Thys Human, NWU

“Future” / So, what’s the (continued) use of publishing in Afrikaans? Notes on hopeful futurity,

Commentary: Deirdre Byrne, UNISA

15.30-16.00  Coffee, tea

16.00-18.00: Encounters

Chair: TBA

16.00-16.30: Andrew Hui, Yale-NUS College, Singapore

Confucius the Stoic: Matteo Ricci and the Encounter between Western and Chinese Philosophy

16.30-17.00: Jaap Maat, University of Amsterdam

Stoic logic, Ramist logic and a remarkable defence of Aristotle

17.00-17.30 : Floris Solleveld, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Language as a Specimen

17.30-18.00: Guillermo Navarro-Alvarado, University of Costa Rica

The ethnography of Edward Wilmot Blyden: from the discovery of Africas to the proposal of a Pan-African nation.

19.00: Conference dinner at Moyo Kirstenbosch (http://www.moyo.co.za). Shuttle will be provided. Dinner voucher (350 rand) must be paid at Conference Desk on 21 November

Day 3, 23 November 2019

9.30-11.00: Decentralized Historiography

Chair: Jaap Maat, University of Amsterdam

9.30-10.00: Vera-Simone Schulz, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut

The Swahili Coast in a Network of References to the Arab Peninsula, Persia, the Indian Ocean, the African Continent and Beyond: Polycentric Histories of Art in Coastal East Africa

10.00-10.30: Hampus Östh Gustafsson, Uppsala University

Embracing the Margins: The Challenge of 20th Century Democracy to the Scandinavian Humanities

10.30-11.00: Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam

Towards a Polycentric History of the Humanities

11.00-11.30: Coffee

11.30-13.00: The Humanities and the Digital

Chair: Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam

11.30-12.00: Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources

Digital Humanities in South Africa

12.00-12.30: Douwe Zeldenrust, Meertens Instituut – Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Collections as networks, The deconstruction of information networks in the collections of the Meertens Instituut (KNAW)

12.30-13.00: Fabian Saptouw, University of Cape Town

The Digital transfiguration of the archive

13.00-14.00: Lunch

14.00-15.45: Round Table on History of Humanities Projects and Prospects

Organization and chair: Shamil Jeppie, UCT

  • African Humanities Program
  • Human Sciences Research Council
  • Other Universals
  • History Access

Participants: Crain Soudien (Human Sciences Research Council); Fred Hendricks (Rhodes University), Adigun Agbaje. (University of Ibadan) & Nomusa Makhubu (University of Cape Town) (African Humanities Programme); Ruchi Chatuverdi (Other Universals, University of Cape Town); Suren Pillay (University of the Western Cape, Centre for Humanities Research and Other Universals), Bodhi Kar (History Access, University of Cape Town).

15.45: Closing and farewell

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History of Humanities, Issue 4.1 is out!

Issue 4.1 of History of Humanities has recently been published. It is yet another rich issue containing a captivating forum discussion on ‘The Inhumanities’, three scholarly papers, a splendid review essay on Renaissance humanism and about 15 book reviews. Hopefully you will enjoy this volume as much as we do!