Lost in Time: Intellectual history before the Guillotine

Are you a shameless antiquarian? Does the French Revolution feel like it only happened yesterday? Are you struggling to persuade colleagues, friends, significant others that Boethius is actually quite interesting? Are you interested in the relation between the medical body and the body politic in Galen’s thought, or the role of facial hair and the Beard Tax in the Boyars’ Revolts for the establishment of monarchical power in early modern Russia? The 1st Lost In Time interdisciplinary intellectual history conference offers a platform for scholars from a variety of disciplines who are interested in concepts and their contexts, which have not traditionally predominated within intellectual history.

The joy of intellectual history is its ability to retrieve long lost concepts from the past. With this in mind, our conference aims to bring together historians working on topics, times, and territories from across the pre-French Revolution globe. This is an invitation to scholars of the classical world, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period to introduce us to unanticipated aspects of the intellectual past.

Recently, works that have connected the histories of science, theology, philology, scholarship, education, philosophy, literature, and more have transformed the field. In the spirit of this vibrant interdisciplinarity and with the aim of expanding the discipline further, we invite proposals that fir one or more of the following strands:

• Encouraging greater interdisciplinarity: lost ideas from the realm of politics, philosophy, science, theology, philology, scholarship, etc.

• Exploring underappreciated sources, including games, translations, neo-Latin writing, fiction, and sermons, as repositories of lost ideas in intellectual history

• Listening to lost ideas from overlooked periods, geographies, and people

Please submit an abstract (250 words) and a short speaker biography (100 words) [email protected] the 10th of November, 2024. All papers should last no more than 20 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A.

We particularly welcome applications from graduate students and early career scholars.