Call for Papers
The Body in Early Modern Italy

The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland

17-19 October 2002

This conference will bring together scholars from numerous
disciplines to consider the multifaceted representations of the body
in early modern Italy, ca. 1300-1700. Configurations of the body in
the visual arts, literature, and theory (philosophy, theology,
medicine, and other disciplines) suggest numerous intersections of
gender studies with investigations of early modernity. Consideration
of the body as either metaphor or physical presence can ground
discussion of such topics as political theory, poetics, the
physiology of real and imagined or speculative bodies (the maternal,
the embryonic, the impaired, distressed, or possessed, the confined
or banished, the monstrous, the demonic, the sacramental), the body
as part or whole, identity or otherness, as matter in its relation to
senses, spirit, soul, or mind, the body as vehicle or obstacle to
knowledge, the history of the imagination and the emotions, the
aesthetics of beauty and grotesquerie. Researchers from a variety of
disciplines such as history, art history, literature, history of
science, religion, or medicine, or political theory are invited to
submit abstracts of 250 words and a one-page cv by 30 March 2002.
Contributors will be notified by 30 April 2002.

Organizers: Julia L. Hairston and Walter Stephens
Abstracts and cvs should be sent, preferably via e-mail, to:
julia.hairstonuniroma1.it

or to:

Julia L. Hairston
via G. Branca, 70
00153 Rome, Italy

tel./fax: *39-06-574-4801

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