The Center for Early Cultures at UC Irvine is pleased to announce our 2017 Conference – "Many Will Travel": Translation and Travel in Early Cultures.
Our keynote speakers will be Cynthia Brown from UCSB and John Ganim from UC Riverside.
Conference Date: October 13–14, 2017
Paper Proposal Deadline: August 31, 2017
Montaigne, in the early modern period, translates songs from the New World in his essay "On the Cannibals," even giving an account of the travel of several natives to Europe and suggesting provocatively the way their values might translate across to ours. From the ancient and medieval concept of translatio imperii studii to early modern relationships with the New World, early cultures provide us with an excellent set of ways for thinking about travel and translation.
This year's Early Cultures Conference is looking for papers that investigate how travel and/or translation figure into ancient, medieval, and early modern cultures. In addition to these political and cultural possibilities for travel and translation, we are also curious in the travel to imagined or poetic worlds. Also welcome are papers that consider travel to spiritual realms, where not all translation is strictly textual. In concord with these imaginative and religious travels, we also are interested in work that considers the modern need for translation of the past cultures that we are interested in. The move to "modernize" or "update" early texts like Shakespeare or Chaucer might suggests limits on our capacity to travel to the past. Indeed, we hope that in a conference where we continually travel to the past we will also shed light on the pressing problems regarding cultural, historical, and actual translation in the present. We invite papers that address this theme in history, literature, philosophy, or the history of art.
Possible Topics for Papers might Include:
- Translatio imperii and the travel of empire
- Travel narratives (and their translation)
- Travel in romance
- First contact and translation in the New World
- Travel to ruins and sites of the ancient world
- Translation and travel between historical periods
- Travel and translation against hostile borders
- The need to translate the past
- Figuration and/or typology
- The translation of ideas into new languages and/or disciplines
We invite abstracts of 300 words or less and a 1 page CV to be sent to early.cultures.conference@gmail.com by August 31, 2017.
Source: RSA