cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Papers:
Belief and Disbelief in the Space Between, 1914-1945



University of Portland, Portland, Oregon, June 17-19, 2010

The interwar years have often been regarded as a period of secularization, disillusionment, and disenchantment, yet many of the period’s cultural productions engage questions of faith, Belief, and spirituality. This interdisciplinary conference invites literary and cultural critics, historians, and scholars of modern religion and philosophy to explore a range of topics relating to the collision of belief and disbelief in the years between 1914 and 1945.

Possible topics include:
• religious themes and traditions in the arts and popular culture

• the impact of war on faith and the apprehension of the unseen 

• new conceptions of the sacred and the profane

• the rise of faith-infused nationalisms

• political propaganda as secular dogma

• artistic representations of the supernatural or the fantastic 

• aesthetic principles informed by belief or disbelief
• the public and private dimensions of faith and doubt
• disillusionment in traditional institutions
• the coexistence of magic and science

• the role of class, gender, and/or ethnicity in religious identification
• engagement with non-Western religions and those crossing cultural, ethnic, and national boundaries

Please send 300-word abstract and one-page CV to Geneviève Brassard (Brassard@up.edu).

Deadline (extended): February 1, 2010.

Keynote Speaker: Gauri Viswanathan, Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998) and "Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy" (PMLA 2008).