Thursday, October 24, 2019
09:00–09:30 Welcome & Introduction
09:30–11:30 Session I: What is Western about the West? Orientalism?
Nil Palabiyik (Munich): Was there an Eastern Orientalism? How Ottoman Learned Practices Shaped Oriental Studies in Early Modern Europe
Ottfried Fraisse (Halle/Saale): Ignác Goldziher’s Perspective from the Margins of Europe: Historicizing Islam between East and West
Lena Salaymeh (Tel Aviv): What is Western about the West? Coloniality of Scholarship
Chair: Omar Kamil (Erfurt)
12:00–14:00 Session II: East Asian Perspectives on the West
Hong‐Bin Lim (Seoul): Korean Soul at Crossroads: Against Antiliberal Use of “Orientalism” (in German)
Chanwon Sun (Seoul): Reflections on “Western” Morality
Chair: Bärbel Frischmann (Erfurt)
15:30–17:30 Session III: What does Western Reason mean?
Klaus Vieweg (Jena): Reason and Universalism in Hegel – against the Terror of the Particular (in German)
Heiner Klemme (Halle/Saale): Self‐Conceptions of Reason in Kant
Pirmin Stekeler‐Weithofer (Leipzig): The Universal Notion of a Person in a Globalized Western Culture
Chair: Sergey Sistiaga (Erfurt)
18:00–19:00 Keynote
Mark Bassin (Stockholm): A Russian Clash of Civilizations? Huntington’s “West” and Lev Gumilev’s Theory of “Superethnos”
Conference Dinner
Friday, October 25, 2019
09:00–11:00 Session IV: What is Western about the Postcolonial?
Sam Haddad (New York): Bypassing the West with Derrida and Glissant
James Kim (New York): Homer, Fanon, and the Angry Little Asian Girl: Towards a Comparative Analysis of Racial Anger
Cristiana Sogno (New York): Response
Chair: Chris GoGwilt (New York)
11:30–13:30 Session V: What is Western about the Postsecular?
Mahlika Hopwood (New York): The Genderings of Eden: Postsecular Communities and the Loneliness of the West
Holt Meyer (Erfurt): Orthodox Postsecularism in The Americans
Chris GoGwilt (New York): Producing a Postsecular West: The Television Set of The Americans
Chair: Cristiana Sogno (New York)
15:00–17:00 Session VI: Orthodox Christian Cultures and their Neighbors on the West: Constructions, Overlappings, Alliances
Alfons Brüning (Amsterdam‐Nijmegen): Inter‐Religious Dialogue or Strategic Alliance? Encounters between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam since the End of the Soviet Union
Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus): Alexander Dugin, Orthodoxy and Islam: The Geopolitics of Eurasia and the Atlantic West
Vasilios N. Makrides (Erfurt): Dimitri Kitsikis and his Geopolitical Theory about the “Intermediary Region” between East and West
Chair: Vasilios N. Makrides (Erfurt)
17:30–19:30 Session VII: The (Medieval) Occident – a Spatio‐Temporal Construct and Its World‐Shaping Claims
Christoph Mauntel (Tübingen): Competing with the East. Geographic Ideas and Cultural Selfassessments of the West in Medieval Latin‐Christian Thought
Thorsten Wollina (Dublin): Power and Knowledge About History: Syrian and Egyptian Engagementswith the ‘Middle Ages’
Markus Vinzent (London/Erfurt): What is Foreign Becomes Close and what is Close Becomes Foreign. Meister Eckhart’s Geography
Chair: Sabine Schmolinsky (Erfurt)
Conference Dinner
Saturday, October 26, 2019
09:00–11:00 Session VIII: Masaryk’s realistic Center in spatial and textual Models between East and West
Nora Schmidt (Erfurt): A (Western) Culture of Dialogue and its Transformations into Text. The figure of T.G.Masaryk
Johannes Gleixner (Munich): The Empirical Foundation of a Discursive space. Masaryk as a Mediator between East and West
Vratislav Doubek (Prague): Czech Political Thought between East and West during World War I (in German)
Chair: Anna Artwinska (Leipzig)
11:30–13:30 Session IX: Places and Times of the Utopian and the West
Daniel Boyarin (Berkeley): Revisioning Diaspora
Nikolaus Wegmann (Princeton): Re‐reading the West
Justus Fetscher (Mannheim): Unbridging the Gap. The Resilience and Return of Things Southern in Saša Stanišić’s “Wie der Soldat das Grammophon repariert (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone)”
Chair: Nils Plath (Erfurt)
13:30 Final Discussion
Chair: Holt Meyer (Erfurt)