CHEP 2011 Conference: The Cultural History of Emotions in Pre-modernity2

 CHEP 2011

The Cultural History of Emotions in Pre-Modernity II

Emotions in East and West

İstanbul, September 29 – October 1, 2011

Minerva Han, Karaköy

CHEP 2011 Conference organized jointly by Sabancı University and Bilkent University starts on 29 September.

Developed jointly by historians at Sabancı University (İstanbul), Bilkent University (Ankara), University of Washington (Seattle, USA) and the Network for Cultural History of Emotions in Pre-modernity (CHEP) at Umeå University (Umeå, Sweden), the program will run over three days and include six invited keynote talks and a full calendar of talks by established scholars, post-graduates and advanced graduate students.

Building on the momentum of the successful 2008 workshop held at Umeå University in Sweden, a new conference on the cultural history of emotions is now being organized, this time in İstanbul, Turkey. Developed jointly by historians at Sabancı University (İstanbul), Bilkent University (Ankara), University of Washington (Seattle) and the Network for Cultural History of Emotions in Pre-modernity (CHEP) at Umeå University, the program will run over three days and include six invited keynote talks and a full calendar of talks by established scholars, post-graduates and advanced graduate students in the arts and humanities, in addition to providing opportunities to sample life in one of the world’s most fascinating cities. 

The conference’s general theme is Emotions in East and West.  So far the history of emotions has been dominated by a western and European perspective. Our aim is to organize a first conference on this theme in Turkey which we hope will attract new scholars and students into the field and bring researchers from east and west together for discussions on how to develop comparative and multicultural analyses in the future. We welcome contributions on all aspects of the cultural history of emotions from as many disciplines and diverse approaches as possible, including (but not limited to) history, the history of ideas, art, literature, musicology, politics, philosophy, cultural anthropology, religion, and gender studies.  The conference will continue to explore the broad themes of the Umeå gathering: for example, emotions as a historical concept, emotions in religious and political contexts, visual representations of emotions and emotional gestures, the language of emotions and its literary manifestations, music and emotions, the gendering of emotions, sensibility, sentimentalism, love, melancholy, and despair. In addition we will especially welcome papers dealing with inter-cultural representations of emotions (Easterners and Westerners representing each other’s emotions), emotions and cultural identities, multi-cultural and comparative perspectives.