Call for Papers:

"Sensing and Feeling: The Embodiment of Experience in the Eighteenth
Century"

The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University is pleased
to announce the sixth Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop, to be held on
May 23-26, 2007. The workshop is part of a series of annual
interdisciplinary events that has been running since 2002, with 20-30
scholars presenting and discussing pre-circulated papers on a broad topic in
a congenial setting.

Our topic for 2007 is "Sensing and Feeling: The embodiment of experience in
the eighteenth century". Connecting mental and social practices to bodily
sensation became crucial in many different venues during the eighteenth
century. How were cognition, experience, and feelings understood to be
linked to the body? What were the mediations between the sensorium and
religious, social, and political practices?

Our aim is to go beyond the Foucauldian notion that the body is above all a
medium of power - suffering its consequences or heroically offering
resistance to it. We seek to provide a more nuanced perspective on the body
by investigating sensation, embodiment, and the connections between them, at
the levels both of experience and of conceptualization of experience. How
did understandings of the embodiment of cognition and affect shift over
time? What sort of social and psychological practices were enabled by
thinking of the senses in certain ways? How, in turn, did these practices
prompt a rethinking of the nexus of psychic and physiological realities? And
how did representational practices (visual, musical, textual, scientific,
dramatic, etc.) respond to such shifts?

Papers might address topics such as:

* the shifting relationship between sensing and feeling

* the isolation and division of the senses

* sensorial mutilation, phantom limbs and prostheses

* the relationship of "inner sense" to the outer senses

* the changing relations between religious experience (conviction,
conversion, enthusiasm, etc.) to the senses and embodiment

* aesthetics and aesthesiology

* the conceptualization of the embodiment of thought and feeling in
different spheres (physiology, philosophy, medicine, anthropology, drama,
literary criticism, etc.)

* the place of embodiment of thought or feeling in the changing
understandings of the relationship between body and soul

* the social organization of the senses

* the embodiment of sympathy, pity, compassion, and empathy

* skin and touch

* eighteenth-century texts and institutions seen from the vantage of current
research in cognitive science and related disciplines

* the relations of sight or vision to the other embodied senses in
eighteenth-century science and natural philosophy

The workshop format will consist of focused discussion of four to six
pre-circulated papers a day, amid socializing and refreshment. The workshop
will draw both on the wide community of eighteenth-century scholars and on
the large and growing group of scholars in this field at Indiana
University-Bloomington. The workshop will cover most expenses of those
scholars chosen to present their work: accommodations, travel (up to a
certain limit), and most meals.

We are asking for applications to be sent to us by Monday, 8 January 2007.
The application consists of a two-page description of the proposed paper as
well as a current CV. Please email or send your application to Dr. Barbara
Truesdell, Weatherly Hall North, Room 122, Bloomington, IN 47405, Telephone
812/855-2856, email voltaire@indiana.edu. Papers will be selected by an
interdisciplinary committee.

For further information please refer to our website,
http://www.indiana.edu/~voltaire/
, or contact the director of the Center,
Dror Wahrman, Dept. of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405,
e-mail dwahrman@indiana.edu.