Call for Papers "National Scholarship and Transnational Experience: Politics, Identity and Objectivity in the Humanities and Social Sciences" Interdisciplinary Colloquium University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC (USA) 6-8 April 2006
This upcoming colloquium will bring together scholars and graduate students from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss the relationship between nationalism and transnationalism in the development of the humanities and social sciences in Europe. The presenters will place new transnational approaches in historical perspective and will consider how transnational experience, ideas, and contacts have influenced the production of 'national' knowledge. The participants will cover a wide range of fields, including anthropology, archaeology, ethnology, folklore, history, literature, philology, and philosophy. The public is invited and welcome to attend! In the last two centuries, the nation has been a guiding concept in the practice of the humanities and social sciences. Nations have constituted not only institutionalized categories and topics of study, but also the dominant sites of specialization within many of the disciplines. At the same time, however the same scholars working in national or even nationalist contexts have invariably engaged colleagues, ideas, and issues beyond the frontiers of the nation-state. Whether grappling with far-reaching world events or confronting cleavages in their own societies, these scholars have found their national frameworks consistently under threat by transnational impulses. The result has been a complex and problematic relationship that remains salient today, even as some scholars recognize that nationally-based research does not fit the contemporary reality of intellectual, human, and capital flow among countries. In response, a number of humanities and social science scholars have begun adopting various global or comparative ways of thinking about their respective disciplines. While there are some clear differences among these approaches, they all share a more transnational orientation that is critical of the biases and limits of national categories and that makes the national perspective itself an object of study. Both the shape and scope of these trends may be relatively new, but the relationship between "national" scholarship and its transnational context has long been a crucial factor in the development of the disciplines. While the national influence upon these disciplines has received in-depth attention from scholars in a number of fields, the transnational component remains underexplored, even as it informs much recent scholarship on the history of the humanities and social sciences. This interdisciplinary colloquium, sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Center for European Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and the Kenan Fund of the Department of History at UNC Chapel Hill, considers the relationship between national scholarship and transnational experience. We are pleased to have Martin Jay (Professor, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley) delivering the Opening Address: Can There be National Philosophies in a Transnational World? Other participants include Karen Hagemann, Richard Handler, J. Laurence Hare, Jr., Jonathan Hess, Young-Sun Hong, Johanna Jacobsen, Konrad Jarausch, Philip Kohl, Kader Konuk, Lloyd Kramer, Suzanne Marchand, Patricia Mázon, Michael Meng, David Pan, Damani Partridge, H. Glenn Penny, Jennifer Schacker, Justin Stagl, Philipp Stelzel, Katie Trumpener, and Till van Rahden Contact: J. Laurence Hare, Jr. and Johanna Micaela Jacobsen Department of History University of North Carolina Hamilton Hall, CB #3195, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195 USA Phone: +1 (919) 962-2115 Fax: +1 (919) 962-1403 Email: [email protected] or [email protected] Web: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~johannaj/nationalscholarship _________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org/ Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://agd.polylog.org/cal/
