Material Culture, Labor and Childhood Identities

Submissions are being sought for a collection of essays tentatively titled All Things Arabia: Arabian Identity and Material Culture. The goal of this collection is twofold. First, we would like to challenge existing scholarship by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, or Franz Fanon and, instead of looking at the other spaces of the Near Orient as the “great complementary opposite” of the West, to suggest new, more complex, and unbiased ways of understanding the cultural identity of the Arabian Peninsula through the things that stand for this place.

Eighteenth-Century War Representation

National University of Singapore, 21-22 April 2018

Scholars have given less attention to war representation of the eighteenth-century than to that of other periods. This is probably a result of the absence of any important texts about war, and of widespread interest in the twentieth century.

However, many important ways of representing and understanding war emerged in the eighteenth century. There was, for instance, a new sense of the soldier's or civilian's experience of war, and of the infiltration of war into ordinary life.