"I would I knew his mind." - (Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1.2.33)
"My own mind is my own church." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (I.i)
"Where is my mind" – The Pixies
The Department of English at Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus will host its Fourteenth Annual International Academic Conference on Friday, 20th and Saturday, 21st May. The keynote speaker is Jonathan Sawday (Saint Louis University, Missouri).
Intangible, hard to imagine, the mind cannot be contemplated without itself. You can set it to something, be put into it, go out of it, lose it, and keep something in it. Originally related to memory, the mind is often associated with will; it might somehow connect to (or even house) the soul, or be housed in the brain. Medievals were reminded to keep God and the judgement in mind in all actions. Early moderns worried about how the passions of the mind overpowered reason; their wit was their mind, but their five wits were their senses. If the age of reason relied on mind for revelations, it also debated whether the mind is a cogito or tabula rasa. For phenomenologists, mind is profoundly shaped by physical experience, for Freudians by instinct, for structuralists by language. We might now ask with The Pixies, "where is my mind".
The mind is the locus of human sensation. It is in all we do, particularly as academics, students, teachers. But mind is, nonetheless, difficult to make sense of, easier sensed than understood, and intricately linked to the senses themselves. Though we experience the physical world through various parts of the body, the mind controls our analysis and synthesis of those sensations. Is the mind the sixth sense or simply what creates from the five senses a world we can understand? In imagination, we experience the unknown and known through art and literature, dream, language, memory. The mantra 'mind over matter' privileges mind over tangibles, suggesting the mind's power to shape the world itself. Exploiting the interplay between the "matter" of artistic media and the varied minds of readers, viewers and patrons, writers and artists open up meaning / generate ambiguity. Questions of the mind, how it works, and how powerful it is are relevant to our conceptions of past, present and future.
This conference seeks to make sense of the mind and to put us in mind of the senses. The organisers welcome papers on topics that might include, but are not limited to the following themes:
- Making Sense, Sense and Sensitivity, Insight, and other metaphors of mind
- Inner worlds, Mental spaces, Creative processes
- The mind's relation to the Five Senses: touch, taste, smell, sound, sight, [and the sixth sense]
- Disability (i.e. deafness, blindness, mental disability), Neurology, Mental Processes
- The mind and perception of time (past, present, future)
- Body/Mind duality, Medical humanities
- Mindfulness (or Mindlessness; Being in / out of mind / out of your mind
- Sense and Nonsense; Reason, Madness, Dreams
- Theoretical approaches to understanding mind
- Mental 'actions': detachment, defamiliarisation, abstraction, theory/theorizing, contemplation
- Mind in constructions of identity and otherness (gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity)
Papers should be no longer than 20mins in length. If you would like to present a paper, please email a 300 word abstract and short biog before Sunday 6th of March to Dr Andrew J. Power at slumadridconference@gmail.com. A small registration fee (€35 for students, €50 for lecturers and professors) will go towards the costs of hosting the conference. To register please go to http://apply.madrid.slu.edu/activities/special8/step1/activity/183 and follow the instructions on screen.