cfp.english.upenn.edu

The cultural moment of the Renaissance can be characterized not only as a movement in time - as artists and writers looked back to and marked a new sense of temporal displacement from the cultural and political forms of classical antiquity - but also as a set of real and imagined passages through space. These geographical transits often seem to fall along the lines of the compass rose: we might think here of the movement from East to West of Greek art, texts and intellectuals and its mythic-historical corollary in the translatio imperii; or of the spread of cultural forms and discourses northward from Florence, Venice, and Rome through the period.
“Renaissance Orientations: East and West, North and South” aims to bring together graduate students from across the disciplines to explore and interrogate the usefulness and importance of these conceptual axes for the study of Renaissance cultural space, broadly conceived and at any scale, from the local to the global. We welcome papers offering new perspectives on traditional lines of interaction, as well as those which expand or destabilize prevailing structures of Renaissance cultural geography.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to renaissanceorientations@gmail.com by Feburary 15, 2013.