cfp.english.upenn.edu

From the beginning, conceptualizations of the Renaissance have been concerned with borders: between the classical past and the modern present; between pagan and Christian; between the civilized and the barbarous. Even as the idea of the Renaissance has endured various critiques over the past half century, this attention to borders has only intensified. In current debates about secularization and periodization in Renaissance studies, the boundaries between past and present and between the sacred and the profane have taken on a newly charged intensity. And these period-specific border disputes relate to more general questions in the humanities today: the future of interdisciplinarity; the role of material culture in the study of art; political theology and the development of the liberal state; and Jacques Ranciere’s reading of aesthetics as a “distribution of the sensible.”

We invite graduate students from across the disciplines to submit abstracts addressing the issue of borders in the Renaissance, broadly conceived. Topics of interest might include:
- - National territory, identity, and art

- - Marginalia

- - Relations between the disciplines

- - Levels of style, genre, and class

- - Periodization

- - Secularization

- - City and country

- - Economic, political, and aesthetic distribution

- - Citizen, human, creature

- - Exceptions and emergencies

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to renaissanceborders@gmail.com by February 1, 2012.