CFP: The Molloy University Philosophy Conference featuring the North American Sartre Society

The Molloy University Philosophy Conference 

featuring the North American Sartre Society

29th Annual Meeting

Call for Papers

October 25-27, 2024

Molloy University

*This conference will be fully hybrid*

Submission Deadline: July 15th, 2024

Conference Themes:

Existential Medicine & Existentialism and Disability

Keynote Speaker:

Jennifer Scuro

Jennifer Scuro received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research. She has taught Philosophy and Ethics for over 25 years and is now an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Molloy University. Her research applies the Continental tradition, including the existentialist tradition, to issues related to critical disability studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and bioethics, with new research on the intersection of disability and trauma. 

She is the author of Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lexington Books 2018) and The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (Rowman & Littlefield International 2017), the latter of which is a graphic novel narrative with a feminist philosophical analysis of pregnant embodiment and grief. 

Her most recent publications include “The Postcolonial and the Post-Traumatic: Specters and Syndromes of White Feminist Canon” in the latest issue of philoSOPHIA: a Journal of trans Continental Feminism (Vol. 13, 2023) and the “Diagnosis” and “Trauma” entries for the collection, Keywords/Images in Graphic Medicine, (B. Martino & L. Diedrich, eds.) forthcoming with Penn State University Press.

The North American Sartre Society (NASS) is inviting proposals for our 29th meeting, taking place October 25-27, 2024 at Molloy University, in Rockville Centre, NY.

Our conference themes are Existential Medicine and Existentialism and Disability. We invite proposals on all topics related to these themes, including, but not limited to:

• The overreliance on naturalism in modern medicine

• Bad faith, authenticity, and the illness experience

• How traditional existentialism does or does not account for the experiences of disability or neurodivergence

• Existentialism and anti-psychiatry

• Phenomenology of the illness experience, the body uncanny

• The status of disability in Sartre’s ethics of integral humanity

• Challenging ableist conceptions of the human in existentialism

• Sartrean phenomenology and mental illness

• Fanon, colonial mental illness, and decolonial phenomenology

• Sartre’s own experience of disability

• Diagnostic labels, facticity, and transcendence

In addition, we invite proposals from any area of Sartre studies and from any disciplinary background.In the spirit of Sartre’s eclectic thinking, we encourage proposals that address philosophy, literature, theater, aesthetics, psychology, politics, intellectual history, art, music, and other disciplines. Aiming to foster diverse and pluralistic approaches, we understand Sartre Studies broadly to indicate work in the existentialist tradition, including work emerging from thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Angela Davis, Albert Camus, Anna Julia Cooper, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Lewis R. Gordon, Frederick Douglass, Kathryn Sophia Belle, Steve Biko, Naomi Zack, Chabani Manganyi, Emilio Uranga, Jorge Portilla, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Keiji Nishitani, Azzedine Haddour, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas, Sara Ahmed, danielle davis, bell hooks, Kamau Brathwaite, Nathalie Etoke, Achille Mbembe, Suzanne Césaire, James Baldwin and others.

This conference is fully hybrid. Please indicate in your proposal whether you plan to present in person or remotely.

A limited number of stipends will be provided for graduate students and underemployed scholars who are attending in person. Please indicate in your proposal if you wish to be considered for a stipend.

Information on lodging and travel will be forthcoming.

The submission process is as follows:

• The submission deadline is July 15th 

• We are accepting abstracts of 300-500 words. Reading time for papers is 20-25 minutes.

• We will accept proposals for both individual papers and panel proposals.

• English or French is acceptable

• Please submit your abstract (or any questions) by email to NASS President, Kiki Berk, [email protected]u 

• Graduate students are encouraged to submit.

• All proposals will be forwarded to the program committee for review.

Contacts:

Kiki Berk, NASS President [email protected]

Kimberly S. Engels, Treasurer and Conference Host: [email protected]

Dane Sawyer, NASS Co-President: [email protected] 

Damon Boria, NASS Executive Board Member: [email protected]

T Storm Heter, NASS Executive Board Member: [email protected]

Elizabeth Butterfield, NASS Executive Board Member: [email protected]

Jake Jackson, NASS Member at Large: [email protected]

LaRose Parris, NASS Member at Large: [email protected]

A Shahid Stover, NASS Member at Large: [email protected]

NASS Webpage:https://www.northamericansartresociety.org

NASS Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/SartreSociety/

Sartre Studies International https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/sartre-studies/sartre-studies-overview.xml