THE CITY AND THE IMAGINATION

30 June 2003
St John's College, Cambridge
Fisher Building

The next major project planned by the research group 'Cultural History & Literary Imagination' at the University of Cambridge is an international and interdisciplinary conference in 2004 on cities and the ways in which imagination shapes both the perception and the representation of the city as a highly symbolic place for the intersection of different historical and cultural identities.

As a first step we are going to hold a one-day workshop, involving a variety of scholars who have particular kinds of expertise and experience of the many ways in which cities and urban spaces have been conceived and discussed in the context of medieval, modern, and contemporary culture. We envisage that the 2004 conference would provide opportunities to compare images of the city as a symbolic, material and epistemic space of experience across these historical periods, including the models familiar from such classics of urban studies as Georg Simmel, Lewis Mumford, and Henri Lefebvre, and including contemporary perspectives from cultural geography and ethnography. The workshop provides an initial opportunity to compare notes on the issues in an informal framework, and to identify themes on which the conference ought to focus. As such, this workshop is of an experimental nature which seeks to bridge the gap between difference disciplines in the social sciences, literary studies and historical disciplines.

The workshop is open to the public and we welcome participation from both faculty members and postgraduate students.