The Making of the Humanities IX: Unfolding Disciplines in the History of the Humanities

The 9th Making of the Humanities conference in Barcelona (2021) will be digital or hybrid. The submission deadline is 15 May. The conference will take place between 2 p.m. and 9 p.m. each day (CET)

Hosted by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra with the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

Goal of the Making of the Humanities (MoH) Conferences:
The MoH conferences are organized by the Society for the History of the Humanities and bring together scholars and historians interested in the history of a wide variety of disciplines, including archaeology, art history, historiography, linguistics, literary studies, media studies, musicology, and philology, tracing these fields from their earliest developments to the modern day.
We welcome panels and papers on any period or region. We are especially interested in work that transcends the history of specific humanities disciplines by comparing scholarly practices across disciplines and civilisations.
For 2021, we will continue the special conference theme. We encourage submissions that explore this theme, but remain fully open to submissions addressing other subjects too.

Unfolding Disciplines in the History of the Humanities
A growing body of scholarship suggests that the historiography of the humanities is increasingly organized around new interdisciplinary collaborations that affect the very understanding of what it means to belong to a Humanities field. For 2021, we invite contributions that interlace different disciplinary approaches in order to frame humanistic scholarship in terms of a continued engagement with the limits and possibilities offered by the softening and even erasure of disciplinary boundaries. Participants are also encouraged to think expansively about the impact of the ongoing process of reinvention of established as well as new fields as a result of increased cross-pollination and collaboration.

Please note that the Making of the Humanities conferences are not concerned with the history of art, the history of music, or the history of literature, and so on, but instead with the history of art history, the history of musicology, the history of literary studies, etc.

Keynote Speakers at MoH-IX:
- Cristina Dondi (Oxford University): “The History of the Book and Libraries: From Bibliophilia to Social and Economic History”
- Maribel Fierro (CCHS-CSIC Madrid): “Iberian Humanities and the Historical Experience of Religious Pluralism”
- Matthew Rampley (Masaryk University): “Naturalistic Theories in the Humanities: Past and Present”

Paper Submissions:
Abstracts of single papers (30 minutes including discussion) should contain the name of the speaker, full contact address (including email address), the title, and a summary of the paper of maximally 250 words. For more information about submitting abstracts, see the submission page.

Deadline for abstracts: 15 May 2021
Notification of acceptance: July 2021

Panel Submissions:
Panels last 1.5 to 2 hours and can consist of 3–4 papers and possibly a commentary on a coherent theme including discussion. Panel proposals should contain, respectively, the name of the chair, the names of the speakers and commentator, full contact addresses (including email addresses), the title of the panel, a short (150 words) description of the panel’s content, and for each paper an abstract of maximally 250 words. For more information about submitting panels, see the submission page.

Deadline for panel proposals: 15 May 2021
Notification of acceptance: July 2021

Conference Fee:
Since the conference will be digital (or at best hybrid), the conference fee will be kept to an absolute minimum and will probably be waived. Yet each participant needs to be a member of the Society for the History of the Humanities ($30 for PhD students, $60 for others). Membership includes subscription to the journal History of Humanities. For further information, see the website of the Society for the History of the Humanities.

Local Organizing Committee:
Daniele Cozzoli (UPF), Linda Gale Jones (UPF), Tomas Macsotay (UPF), and Neus Rotger (UOC)