Graduate Student Conference - CFP

[Inna Mattei]

Dear SEELANGers,


On behalf of the Humanities Center at Harvard University, we would kindly
like to ask you to forward the following message and/or distribute the
attached Call for Papers to the graduate students in your department.  This
email seeks graduate student speakers for this year's Humanities Center
interdisciplinary graduate student conference, titled "Modernity and
Culture: Georg Simmel in Context," which will be held on April 16th and
17th, 2005.



We highly appreciate your support.

With best wishes,



Gundela Hachmann and David Kim





Call For Papers


"Culture and Modernity: Georg Simmel in Context"

The Humanities Center at Harvard University

Spring 2005



An interdisciplinary graduate student conference hosted by the Humanities
Center at Harvard University on April 16th and 17th, 2005.  The conference
seeks to disentangle and reshape the paths of Georg Simmel's influence
across disciplines.



Keynote speaker will be Professor David Frisby of the University of Glasgow,
Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences.



Simmel consciously presents his oeuvre for appropriation and
reinterpretation, allowing for, even necessitating, its simultaneous
perpetuation and disappearance.  Unconcerned with bequeathing a unified set
of ideas, Simmel-a thinker obsessed with origins-denies his own body of
thought a unified point of originary importance.  Against the backdrop of
Simmel's effacement and versatility, where do we locate his scholarship in
the overlapping between cultural and social studies?  We encourage graduate
students from all departments, including economics, history, literature,
philosophy, sociology, and psychology, to submit their abstracts for papers.
Presentations aim to contextualize Simmel's impact on the following topics,
but not limited to:



1. Conflict and Creativity: How can we understand Simmel's concept of
conflict as a binding cultural force fruitful for an interpretation of a
world characterized by global wars?  How are we to conceive his idea that
cultural creation is a source of tragic fragmentation?

2. Urbanism and Life: How do Simmel's perspectives on individuality,
modernity, and urbanism prefigure postmodern engagement with these topics?
To what extent do we still see the contingencies in the urban space as
Simmel delineates in "Metropolis and Mental Life"?  How does Simmel's theory
of the urban space coincide or conflict with other views held by theorists
and writers, like Walter Benjamin and Alfred Döblin?

3. Fashion and Society: Where do we observe constructive and destructive
forces within the creation and dissemination of fashion?  In what ways does
Simmel's insight into fashion at the junction between commodities and
practices develop into his metaphysics of individuality?

4. Film and Modernity: How has Simmel's writing helped us understand the
relationship between film and modernity?  From Simmel's perspective, how do
film and society engender each other?  Where can one trace Simmel's
influence on other twentieth-century film scholars, like Siegfried Kracauer?

5. Money and exchange: During the process of rapidly expanding
industrialization, where does Simmel's Philosophy of Money (1900) situate
the modern individual within the culture of exchange and the exchange of
cultures?  How is Simmel's view of capitalism to be contextualized with
respect to theorists, like Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim?

6. Religion and Individuality: How does Simmel's theory of religion help us
understand the tension between the individual and society?  Confronted with
religious clashes, such as the Middle East conflict, in what ways does
Simmel's concept of religiosity allow or disallow the communion between
people(s) with "different" beliefs?



Graduate students from all disciplines are encouraged to submit paper
abstracts of 350-500 words.  Conference presentations are to be given in
English and should not exceed 15 minutes, which correspond to papers of 6 to
8 pages double-spaced in ordinary type.  Abstracts must be received by
February 15th, 2005.  Notifications of accepted papers will be sent out by
March 1stth.  Please email your abstract as a Word attachment to: Danny
Bowles (djbowles at fas.harvard.edu) or Kristin Jones (jones3 at fas.harvard.edu).
In the body of your email, please include the following: title of paper,
authors name, institutional and departmental affiliation, email address and
telephone number.  For further information, please contact Gundela Hachmann
at hachmann at fas.harvard.edu or David Kim at ddkim at fas.harvard.edu.

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