“The aesthetics of crossing: experiencing the beyond in Abrahamic traditions” international conference will be held in Utrecht (NL), 19-21 March 2015. Funded by the European Research Council (ERC), the conference is hosted by the Dpt. of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, with keynotes from Hans Belting, Lindsay Jones, Christian Lange, Birgit Meyer, and Leigh Eric Schmidt.
The three-day, interdisciplinary, international conference is dedicated to studying the manifold ways in which the body experiences and, at times, traverses the perceived divide between the sacred and the profane. Because religious boundaries are not necessarily registered or crossed by the body in its entirety but by one or a number of its senses, the conference is structured around the body’s senses, including the inner, more incorporeal ones such as the faculty of the imagination. The conference seeks: (a) to produce insights, drawn from the study of primary body-related data (texts, images, objects, practices, etc.), into how the body is the vehicle and agent of religious boundary-crossing; (b) to examine how such conceptualizations and uses of the body are both affirmed and contested within religious and secular traditions; and (c) to locate the study of the body and its boundary-crossing potential in the recent disciplinary and political transformations in the study of religion across the Humanities.
“The aesthetics of crossing: experiencing the beyond in Abrahamic traditions” marks the end of a series of scholarly consultations organized within the framework of HHIT (“The here and the hereafter in Islamic traditions”), a four-year research project funded by the European Research Council and hosted at Utrecht University (http://hhit.wp.hum.uu.nl/). HHIT has been primarily invested in studying Muslim cosmologies and imaginaries, seeking to trace and locate the various boundaries, often unstable and permeable, that divide this world from the otherworld in a variety of Islamic religious discourses and practices. This conference seeks to broaden the work of HHIT in several directions, and to stimulate discussion across disciplines such as Islamic Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, Literature, History of Art, and others.
Paper proposals (< 500 words) for 20-minute presentations are solicited by 31st October in the following areas, as outlined in the full CfP at this link.
For further information, please contact the conference organizers, Christian Lange (Utrecht University) and Simon O’Meara (SOAS, London), at aestheticsofcrossing[at]gmail.com