2009-10 Conferences
June 17-18 (Wednesday - Thursday), 2009
Instruments in Manufacturing
Founders' Room, Lovett Hall
With a major grant from the National Science Foundation, and with additional support from the HRC, this two-day workshop presents and critiques papers to be collected into a published volume. Since 1985, much work has been done on the critical role of instruments in the Scientific Revolution. This collection seeks to continue and correct that effort by focusing on the role of instruments in the Industrial Revolution, a topic thus far neglected, in order to enrich current scholarship on the relationship between science and technology. Organized by Cyrus Mody, assistant professor of history.
September 18, 2009
Emerging Disciplines
Featuring
prominent scholars from across academic disciplines who are shaping
important new fields of scholarly inquiry. The international selection
of speakers represents a broad range of fields, including music and the
mind, neurohistory, cultural economy, broad-spectrum history, cognitive
approaches to art history, Judaic studies, and new approaches to
Americas studies.
November 19-22, 2009
Fondren Library
Hindu Transnationalisms: Origins, Ideologies, Networks
This seminar is part of a two-year network project “The Public Representation of a Religion Called Hindusim,” funded largely by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. At Rice, participants will focus on Hindu nationalist organizations in diaspora, which are at once pluralist and sectarian, and which must tackle two sets of local issues: those that are relevant to migrant communities and those that are relevant in India. This dynamic provides an opportunity for the development of new forms of public Hindu identity. Download the call for papers (deadline June 30, 2009).
December 11-13, 2009
Founders' Room, Lovett
Humanism & Revolution: Eighteenth-Century Europe and its Transatlantic Legacy
This conference sustains international partnerships with scholars at Freie Universtät Berlin and the University of Cambridge and is largely supported by German federal funding as well as private foundation support from the Mercator-Foundation through the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen. The participants will tackle a rich set of questions prompted by the concept of revolution, which has taken a central place in political and philosophical thought since the eighteenth century, and which seems to rely on hopes for historical human progress.
Spring 2010 (dates TBD)
Missions Beyond Missionaries: The Writing of Total Missionary History
Until now almost every study of Western missions in the Middle East over the past two centuries has focused on the experiences of the missionaries themselves, despite the far-reaching ramifications of missions for the cultures and societies of Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Kurds, and others, as well as local Christians, Muslims, and Jews. This symposium, with major support by the Department of History, addresses this shortcoming by exploring native perspectives, and acknowledging the agency and cultural dynamism of Middle Eastern peoples.
February 19, 2010, 9:30 - 4:30
Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library
Museums and the Medical Humanities: Our Continuing Conversation
This day-long symposium advances the discussions generated by the 2008-09 Menil Rice Lectures "Museums and the Medical Humanities: The Arts of Transformation." The program explores a nexus of themes concerning embodiment, creativity, trauma, diagnosis, medicine, healing, reflection, and transformation. Drawing on their distinctive backgrounds and areas of expertise, speakers will address the ways in which shared issues inform their museum collections or have emerged as salient concerns in their clinical interactions and professional practices. In particular, speakers will consider the ways in which themes of embodiment emerge differently (and similarly) in the contexts of a fine arts museum versus a natural science museum versus a medical or hospital setting. In so doing, this program fosters an innovative, transdisciplinary conversation that spans a cross-over audience including the academic community, the museum world, and the Texas Medical Center. The symposium if free and open to the public: students and alumni are warmly encouraged to attend.
- Morning Panel: a distinguished visual artist and three doctors from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, whose specialties include palliative medicine, oncology, and psychiatry.
- Afternoon Panel: three curators from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Menil Collection, and the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
- Closing remarks offered by a discussant.
In addition to funding by the HRC, this symposium is also funded through the Faculty Initiatives Fund, Office of Research, awarded to symposium chair Marcia Brennan, associate professor of art history.
March 4-7, 2010
Society for Seventeenth-Century Music
This international society has met annually since 1993. The Shepherd School of Music hosts the conference this year in expectation of building a bridge between musical performance and the study of music as an academic disciplines, as well as between the School of Music and the School of Humanities. Up to one hundred registrants will attend from across the United States and Europe.
March 14-15, 2010 - Sunday to Monday
Farnsworth Pavilion, Ley Student Center
Crossing Borders: Visualizing Jewish/Christian and Jewish/Muslim Relations in Medieval and Early Modern Times
This conference builds on the assumption that the borders between the minority Jews and the dominant cultures in which they lived were permeable, allowing not only violent persecution but fruitful cultural exchange. With the support of the Departments of Religious Studies and Art History, the Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance, scholars from a variety of disciplines will examine the Birds’ Head Haggadah, the Arena Chapel (Padua), as well as coins, architecture, calendars, prints, and lesser-known manuscripts. The sessions will be open to the broader community, with times for discussions set aside throughout the day.
April 15-18 2010
Histories of the Hidden God
In this mini-conference, several scholars who study Jewish and Early Christian mysticism before the advent of the Kabbalah, within Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity. This era has been left largely unexplored because the mystical tradition has long been assumed to have begun in with Dionysus the Areopagite around the Fifth Century CE. These scholars, therefore, are asking new questions in an emerging field, examining Jewish and Christian scriptures, pseudepigrapha, apocrypha, Dead Sea Scrolls, Gnostic, Hermetic, Patristic, Neo-Platonic, and Hekhalot literature.
