Mnemonic Waves - The Warburg Institute Post-graduate Symposium

The Warburg Institute will host its third Postgraduate Symposium on 15 November 2018. With this conference, we aim to identify and interrogate the ‘seismic waves’ generated by scholars active at the Warburg Institute from its inception to the present, who inherited the founder’s lessons by receiving his waves and producing their own.

Speaking in Hamburg in 1927, Aby Warburg described how an Apollonian cultural historian and a Dionysian philosopher as different as Burckhardt and Nietzsche shared an impulse to detect, elaborate, transform, and eventually transmit ideas from artists and thinkers across time and space, acting as intellectual seismographs:

"We must recognise Burckhardt and Nietzsche as receivers of mnemonic waves [. . .] Both are very sensitive seismographs, which shake in their foundations when they receive and have to retransmit the waves."

Warburg’s legacy has opened new paths for research in the humanities, the sciences, and beyond, as shown by the Institute Library’s division into Image, Word, Orientation, and Action. We are particularly interested in papers exploring themes contained within these four broad categories, which have been studied by past and present scholars who inherited Warburg’s ideas. These may include:

- IMAGE: ancient art and archaeology (Henri Frankfort and Otto Kurz); the baroque (Jennifer Montagu); psychology of perception (Ernst Gombrich); iconography and iconology (Erwin Panofsky); social history of art (Michael Baxandall)

- WORD: resurgence of Greek studies (Jill Kraye); memory and emblematics (Frances Yates and Arnaldo Momigliano)

- ORIENTATION: theories of symbolic forms (Ernst Cassirer); Arabic/Islamic influences in Europe (Charles Burnett); the Reformation (Alastair Hamilton)

- ACTION: magic and medicine (Guido Giglioni); revivals of pagan forms (Fritz Saxl and Edgar Wind); philosophy of magic (D. P. Walker).

Questions might include, but are not limited to, the following:
- How are Warburg Institute scholars and their work affecting your current research?
- What methodological pathways have been opened by these scholars?
- In what ways have their ideas been contradicted, or generated debate?
- How do post-Warburg scholarly traditions apply to contemporary academic discourses?

The Symposium is intended for postgraduate students and early-career researchers. Proposals for papers should be sent to warburg.postgradgmail.com by Thursday 31 May 2018:
- Abstract, in English, of no more than 300 words, for a 20-minute paper, in PDF or Word format.
- One-page CV, including full name, affiliation and contact information.

All candidates will be notified by Friday 29 June 2018.

Limited funding is available to help cover travel expenses. Attendance is free of charge.