[Grad_history_students] Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference March 11-12, 2005

[Judy Ossello]

Körperkontrolle/Kontrollkörper:
>From Regulation to Excess in Fictional Models and Social Practices.
(12/15/04; 3/11-12/05)

An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference hosted by the Department of
Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, March 11-12, 2005.

Keynote speaker: Niklaus Largier
Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Department of German; whose
recent works include Lob der Peitsche. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Erregung.
(Munich, C.H. Beck, 2001.)

Attempts to understand the relationship between the body, control, and
sociopolitical life are at least as old as Plato and Aristotle, and significant
among them are the contributions offered by German-speaking thinkers.  In recent
decades, commentators such as Foucault and Butler have drawn upon Hegel,
Nietzsche and Freud in theorizing ways in which habits, technologies and
institutional practices control the individual body, the social body and the
body politic.  In its interdisciplinary exploration of control in the Germanic
context, our conference is interested in both documented social practices and
fictional models across media such as literature, film and painting, from the
Middle Ages to the present.  By exploring both controlled and controlling
bodies, we hope to gain a better understanding of the uncertain ontological
status of control with respect to regulation and excess.  How are the mechanisms
of control involved in the very excesses they purportedly regulate?  What role
does control play in generative/creative processes?  Does control function
through repetition, reproduction, and suppression, or does control force
intensification of bodily experience, pushing the body to transgress? How is
excess regulated, experienced and represented?  Furthermore, how do different 
disciplines conceptualize and represent the phenomenon of control?

Scholars from the Humanities and Social Sciences are encouraged to interpret the
conference theme broadly and innovatively.  

Graduate students from all disciplines working in the German-speaking context
are invited to submit paper abstracts of 350-500 words in German or English. 
Conference presentations are to be given in English and should not exceed 20
minutes.  Abstracts must be received by 15 December, 2004.  Authors of accepted
papers will be notified via email by 31 January, 2005.  Please email your
abstract as a Word attachment to:

uc-germanic-conference at listhost.uchicago.edu 

In the body of your email, please include the following: title of paper,
author's name, institutional and departmental affiliation, e-mail address and
primary phone number.  Accommodation will be provided for conference
participants.  For further information about the conference, please email to the
above address.

Organized by Darren Ilett, Kym Lanzetta, Catherine Sprecher and Terri Zhu.