CFP: Corporeality and Incorporation: The Body in Literature and Culture Pre-1800 (Graduate Student Conference)

UCI Premodern Graduate Humanities Conference 2025: February 14, 2025

“By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.”

– Portia, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

The concept of embodiment was central to the way in which early cultures conceptualized human relationships—political, social, religious, economic, and affective. The body appears in global literature and culture pre-1800 as a tool for political creation, a vessel for religious experience, a space for identity construction and conflict, and a catalyst for community, among myriad other functions. Premodern communities were formed, ruptured, and reformed around the categorized and hierarchized body; corporeal appearance, ability, and experience became crucial markers of developing sociopolitical categories like race, gender, and class. The process of incorporation into community raises fraught questions about bodily agency, boundedness, and vulnerability. Premodern texts negotiate the debts of care and service that individuals owe to their communities, and what communities should offer in return. The body is also used as a vehicle of knowledge production and a lens through which different disciplines (philosophical, scientific, medical, and others) develop theories of the world. This conference is interested in exploring global premodern understandings of the body, experiences of incorporation, and the way in which these things intersect, commingle, and create tension.

Topics could include but are not limited to:

• Embodied hierarchies: race, gender, sexuality, social status, (dis)ability, etc.

• Reproduction, aging, and bodily change

• Body politic(s): law, power, state formation, conquest, empire, and resistance

• Body, subjectivity, and agency

• Religion, ritual, and embodiment

• Community care and control

• Medical humanities

• Bodily violence, trauma, and vulnerability

• Death, decay, and abjection

• Affect and sensory experience: pain, pleasure, desire, hunger, etc.

• Physical appearance: beauty, clothing, manipulation, image construction, etc.

• Non-human bodies: interspecies embodiment, post-human embodiment, ecology

• Textual bodies: writing, reading, and creation

• The body in movement: labor, sport, play, dance, performance

The 2025 UCI Premodern Graduate Humanities Conference will be held in person on February 14, 2025 on the campus of the University of California, Irvine (hybrid is possible, but in-person presentations are preferred). Please submit proposals via the form linked below by November 11, 2024. In your proposal, include a title, brief abstract of no more than 200 words, and a short biography including your university and department affiliation. We also encourage three-person panel proposals consisting of a 200-word description of the panel theme, as well as abstracts and bios for each of the individual papers. We invite abstracts from disciplines across the humanities including literature (in any language), visual arts, history, drama, anthropology, classics, and more.

Submission form: https://forms.gle/6JBUnhxJGxN3Hk5j8

Please reach out to chelsml3@uci.edu if you have any questions.