CFP: Collecting the Unconscious: Reflections on Sleep and Dreams (grad) (1/15/05; 3/3/05-3/4/05)

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Collecting the Unconscious: Reflections on Sleep and Dreams

Graduate Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/ghf.htm

The Graduate Humanities Forum, a graduate student-run division of the
Penn Humanities Forum, is hosting its 5th Annual Conference on
Thursday, March 3rd and Friday, March 4th, 2005.

The Forum seeks conference proposals on this year’s topic of “sleep and
dreams.” We encourage a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the
notion of sleep. In this symposium, we welcome proposals that consider
any facet of sleep and/or dreams, and we offer the following
suggestions as inspiration:

• Insomnia and somnambulism
• Troubled Sleep: existentialism, bad faith, and the unconscious
• Surrealism and its relation to sleep states
• Magic realism and transitions of consciousness
• Nightmares
• Medieval dream visions
• Nocturnes
• “I have a dream”: Dreams, race, and double-consciousness
• Day dreams: the unconscious and the imaginary
• The political unconscious
• Psychoanalytic approaches to the unconscious (e.g. Kristeva)
• Dreams and the subversive discursive
• “Sleep aids”: sleep, pharmacology, and altered states
• Dreams and gender
• The sleep of reason
• Dream poetics
• Sleep disorders
• The politics of sleep
• Lucid dreaming
• Prophecy, divination, or the oracular dream
• “Brain in a vat”: from Descartes to _The Matrix_

We encourage presenters to consider these issues in light of their own
research or academic interests. In addition to formal papers, we
encourage proposals for panels, group discussions, short seminars, or
workshops. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be emailed by
January 15, 2005 to kmbaumli_at_dept.english.upenn.edu. A committee from
the Graduate Humanities Forum will evaluate all proposals, and
notification of acceptances will be emailed by February 7, 2005.

On Thursday evening, there will be a convocation and keynote address by
Christine Stansell, Princeton. There will be panels and other sessions
on Thursday and Friday. All area graduate students, regardless of year
of study and field, are invited to participate.

About our keynote:

Christine Stansell is professor of history at Princeton University,
where she teaches American women's history as well as courses in the
Program in the Study of Women and Gender. She has long written about
women's history, feminism, sexuality, and cities. Her books are City of
Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986), the anthology
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (1984), and American
Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000).
Her review essays about American history and literature appear
regularly in The New Republic.

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Received on Wed Dec 01 2004 - 12:38:04 EST