CFP: Wilson College Humanities Conference: Prophetic Fragments

Wilson College Humanities Conference

Prophetic Fragments:

Humanities Past, Present, and Future

Saturday, February 28, 2015
10:00am-5:00pm

Held in the Brooks Complex of Wilson College

Chambersburg, PA

sponsored by Wilson’s M.A. in Humanities Program

The theme of this year’s Wilson College Orr Forum is “Prophetic Fragments.” This year’s conference theme is borrowed from Cornel West’s book by the same title and shares with it the view that prophets—ancient and modern, religious and secular—tend to engage in an imaginative critique of the status quo. “Fragments” hints at the marginal role of the prophetic in societies, past and present. But what does this all mean? What is the nature of “prophecy?” How can it connote or evoke echoes of the past and the future at the same time? And how does the Humanities work to do the same, to connect, critique, and predict our pasts, our futures, and our presence? (Pun wholly intended!)

This conference looks to how the various fields represented by the Humanities explore our own relationship to time, to the past, to the present, to the future, or beyond. What glimpses have ancient works afforded us of both then and now? What do contemporary works tell us about ourselves, our forebears, and our progeny? How can we use the Humanities to make sense of who we were, who we are, who we may yet be? How do we use Humanities to critique our societies and ourselves, and what does that critique say about us?

Please feel free to interpret the theme of this conference liberally. Our goal is to bring a group of Humanities scholars from around the region together to articulate and celebrate these always intriguing and confounding questions of prophesy, time, social critique, engaging the status quo, and the manner in which our fields seek to understand any point in-between.

Faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars are invited to submit. Undergraduate students may also submit abstracts, but their submission must be sponsored by a current faculty member at their institution. (For more on this, please contact the conference director.)

It is hoped that this conference will bring together humanities faculty, graduate students, independent scholars, and undergraduate students from regional colleges and universities in a day-long exploration of these questions. To submit a presentation, please send an abstract of approximately 200 words to the email address below.

Send abstracts to:

Dr. Michael G. Cornelius

Program Director, MA in Humanities

Director, Wilson College Humanities Conference

[email protected]

Submit the abstract as either a .doc or .docx file or simply place it into the text of the email itself.

Individual presentations will last no more than 15 minutes; panels of up to 3 individuals may be submitted as well. Each conference participant may submit only one abstract. Abstracts are due by JANUARY 10, 2015.

The conference is sponsored by Wilson’s M.A. in Humanities program, in conjunction with the Orr Forum 2014-15 Lecture and Performance Series.