On 15-16 April 2021, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) will host “Bodies Matter”, a two-day conference on histories and theories of the body. The Conference Committee encourages participation from a diverse range of researchers across the humanities and social sciences.

The conference will feature keynote lectures by Dr. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford and Dr. Willemijn Ruberg, Associate Professor in Cultural History, Universiteit Utrecht. Final remarks and a concluding session will be supervised by Dr. Frans-Willem Korsten, Senior University Lecturer at LUCAS.

Since global antiquity, conceptions of the body have played a central role in culture and society. From physical figures to political metaphors, objects of analysis to sources of value, bodies take multiple forms. They ground emotions, desires and identities, and are inflected by technology. They connect to histories of place and space, both online and offline, and are framed by political, environmental, spiritual, and other discourses. All too often, conceptions of the body have been to delimit or exclude bodies deemed “other” for reasons of race, gender, class or other markers of identity. Never isolated, bodies are also arranged into larger units, from cultural groups to nation states. Thinking through the body not only reshapes our body of knowledge, it also moves us to rethink our lives, together and apart, during unprecedented political, ecological and health crises.

Participants are invited to consider topics including, but not limited to:
• Normative and deviant bodies (outlaw, disabled, ill)
• Performances and representations of the body in various media
• Collective bodies and biopolitics (medicine, ethics, governance, coercion, control,
surveillance, resistance)
• Ecologies of the body (environmental relations, human and non-human bodies)
• Body modification, fragmentation and extension
• Mind and body (philosophies of the body, embodied knowledge, bodies as objects/subjects)
• Bodies in location (urban, suburban, rural and wild spaces)
• Sacred and profane bodies
• Movement and constraint (refugee, migrant and stateless bodies)
• Erotics and hermeneutics of bodies


We invite proposals for 20-minute individual papers and complete panels of 3 presentations. Each presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.

Interested participants are invited to submit their proposal as a single PDF file to bodiesmatterleidenconferencegmail.com by 31 August 2020. Accepted participants will be notified by late-September 2020.

For more information, please see the full call for papers below:
https://www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/binaries/content/assets/geesteswetenschappen/lucas/bodiesmatterconferencecfp.pdf