Call for papers (update)

UPDATE

IMAGINING THE CITY

International interdisciplinary conference to be held at St John’s College, Cambridge, 30 July-2 August 2004.

Keynote Speakers Peter Burke (Cambridge) – Susanne Hauser (Graz) – Nigel Thrift (Oxford)

The organisers have already received offers on topics which range from Eastern Europe to Manhattan and Hollywood, from early post-Roman Europe to contemporary Berlin, and they would welcome further offers which would make it possible to compare the ways in which cities have been imagined from a wide variety of historical and methodological perspectives.

Purpose

Urban culture, its impact on the creative imagination, and the representation of both individual cities and the general nature of life in cities have provided a rich seam of inquiry in recent years for those who work in literary and cultural studies as well as in sociology, geography, and architectural history. The purpose of the conference is to provide a forum for experts in these fields to compare notes on the role of the imagination in conceiving the city as a symbolic place for the intersection of historical and cultural identities, and in representing the city through the media of literature, art, film and performance. The organisers are keen to develop a programme which will look beyond the familiar images of cities in antiquity, the Renaissance, the industrial and the post-industrial world, and focus rather on such aspects of the city as the following:

- the city as a place of utopia, dystopia and myth
- the cultural effects of the social, political and spatial organisation of the city
- the city as a historical and/or symbolic space for the formation of the political imaginary
- the relation between the human and the technical in urban space
- the role of time, emotion and affect in the city
- scenes of cultural exchange and intercultural tension

Proposals

Please send your proposal (title and short summary of content) by Friday 16 January 2004 to either of the following:

Papers may be in English, German or French. The organisers expect to publish a selection of the papers in a volume or volumes designed to exemplify current thinking on the issues concerned in the series Cultural History and Literary Imagination, published by Peter Lang, of which they are the editors. Further information on this series and the activities associated with it can be found on the following website:

http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/german/researchgroup/intro.html