Conference and events archive

From maps to chronicles, from sagas and songs to emerging cities, landscape plays an active part in shaping the medieval world. Much more than a backdrop to narrative, much more than a passive object of knowledge, much more than patches of space to be allocated and appropriated, landscape is a vital force in narrative, power, and knowledge. For this conference, which follows the seminar series of the same name, we invite contributions from researchers at all career stages working on medieval culture in any language.

This two day conference will provide a platform to bring together emerging Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and give attendees an opportunity to share their research whilst interacting with senior academics, activists and community leaders all through a critical engagement with the field of Indigenous Studies.

This conference proposes to contribute to the University of Cambridge legacies of enslavement inquiry through dialogue with world-leading scholars on Black history while also creating a forum to advance the rapidly evolving public debate on slavery’s long legacies and the idea of historical reparation.

The Ottoman Political Economies workshop aims to bring together this work, enable conversations between scholars engaged in this subfield, and showcase it for a wider audience of economic and social historians, social scientists and anthropologists, and theorists of political economy. Overall, the workshop has two objectives: to view the Ottoman empire and its subjects through the lens of political economy; and to question the concepts of political economy and capitalism in the light of Ottoman experiences.

The present and impending environmental crises and resulting social crises require approaches that can grapple with the very complex nature of the problems we face. More specifically, they require researchers in scientific, technological and socially oriented disciplines to come together to explore and understand these complexities, and reflect on how socially oriented, non-technical approaches can work together with technical approaches to address the challenges we face. As a step towards creating spaces for these cross-disciplinary conversations, CRASSHand the NanoDTC are organising a joint event, with an intentionally provocative statement ‘Technology can Save the World’ as the primary subject of discussion.

Before Capitalist Hegemony seeks to re-open the once vibrant debate on the concept of Mode of Production as a heuristic category for the study of the past, focusing in particular on non-capitalist modes apt to describe extra-European pre-industrial societies. The workshop gathers specialists of different areas and periods stretching widely across Afro-Eurasia from Late Antiquity to the nineteenth century, each focusing on key politico-economic structures that produced past societies and that were in turn produced by them. The workshop will conclude with an open table calling for a closer dialogue between empirical research and theoretical investigation and for interdisciplinary collaboration across different fields of history.

This workshop aims to bring together scholars from early modern social, cultural, and environmental history, as well as intellectual historians and historians of science and material culture, to talk about water across different settings and geopolitical contexts in Europe between 1450 and 1700. The focus will be on early modern communities, their social and political institutions, and how they interacted with water.

This film screening and workshop considers the contribution of social realism films to studies of inequalities in health.  The chosen films – “Sorry We Missed You” (Director: Ken Loach, 2019) and “Bicycle Thieves” (Ladri di biciclette, Director: Vittorio de Sica, 1948) – explore the experience of families struggling to do better for their children in bleak economic times; and doing worse.

This film screening and workshop considers the contribution of social realism films to studies of inequalities in health.  The chosen films – “Sorry We Missed You” (Director: Ken Loach, 2019) and “Bicycle Thieves” (Ladri di biciclette, Director: Vittorio de Sica, 1948) – explore the experience of families struggling to do better for their children in bleak economic times; and doing worse.

The topic of the conference is intentionally open to different methodological interpretations. Among the invited speakers there are scholars dealing with theology, natural philosophy, logic and social history. Our conference also aims to bring together scholars of Hebrew, Arabic and Latin medieval philosophy.

The burgeoning research on right-wing populism has given rise to new ethical dilemmas and emotional challenges for researchers, which – despite the increasing interest in populism studies – have been largely overlooked. We seek to address this timely blind spot by bringing together researchers of right-wing populism, and particularly those using qualitative and ethnographic methods, to share their experiences and explore the tensions in studying what Susan Harding has famously termed ‘repugnant others’.

This workshop will bring together political scientists, economists, and contemporary historians to explore how public debates over tax, spending, and borrowing have played out in different electoral contexts since the 1980s. By ranging across disciplinary boundaries and national borders, we hope to map the ‘state of the field’ and to strengthen our understanding of how parties think about tax and spending commitments in the real world.

This workshop is an opportunity to foster active collaboration between participants through a series of exercises and conversations. We hope to articulate the history of remote sensing as a vital and consequential factor in our contemporary lives, which are shaped and understood through daily mediations across distance.

This two-part workshop will feature, first, a hands-on study of objects, Indigenous colours, and traditional instruments from the collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which will highlight the significance of senses and phenomenology for the students.

This two-day online conference critically examines narratives of economic efficiency associated with cost-cutting paradigms, by thinking about externalised and overlooked costs of personal hardship and financial instability arising in economic austerity. Growing disparity and stark changes to life chances are often dismissed as a problem of personal circumstances or work ethic, with struggling households encouraged to manage their finances more efficiently, seek better jobs, and grow their savings to compensate for uncertainty.

‘The (im)possibility of queer presentism’ conference and workshop explores what it might mean for contemporary queer culture to adopt ‘presentism’ as a way of both looking at and living in the world. Since its inception in the early 1990s, queer theory (and its predecessor, Gay and Lesbian Studies) has been principally concerned with time.

This scoping event aims to develop understanding of the University of Cambridge’s decarbonisation research landscape and identify where researchers can benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration and industry input.

Museums have been centres of research from their earliest incarnations as private collections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aligned with Enlightenment ideals of scholarship and learning engendering a rational, ‘civilised’ world, object-centred research informed the development of the natural sciences.

With the aim of discussing key themes in the implementation of arts, cultural heritage and ‘traditional’ knowledge in healing settings in the UK and Inner Asia, this event will bring together a range of stakeholders that engage therapeutic aspects of the arts, heritage and material culture, practitioners of evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine, policy-related beneficiaries, and researchers to exchange knowledge and ideas.

This seminar is aimed at early career academics who aspire to find a publisher for their first book and to academics who have already written one or more scholarly monographs and who aspire to reach broader, non-specialist audiences.

What are the assorted functions of our criticism? In the midst of concerns about the relation between the academy and the state, trust in authority, and conspiracism, questions regarding ‘use’ and ‘function’ in the humanities are ever more pressing. Since Bruno Latour archly observed that critique has ‘run out of steam’, the discussions that postcritique thinker Rita Felski has termed the ‘method wars’ have sometimes been fractious. This conference seeks to return, in a generous spirit of collaboration, to imperative questions regarding the humanities’ functions, methods, and contribution both within and beyond the academy.

The aim of the workshop is to bring race theory and equality law in conversation with ECHR jurisprudence to understand the significance of race in human rights theory and highlight the possibilities and limits within European human rights law to address racism. During the course of the workshop, we will explore how racial grounds matter in a range of thematic clusters of human rights, such as: State violence and bodily integrity, terrorism, domestic abuse, hate speech, migration, protest, privacy, domestic violence, sexual and reproductive rights, medicine, environment, and poverty.

Resilience has emerged as a key theme for global climate action and sustainable development. Manifesting across academic and policy discourses, this raises a fundamental issue in defining the concept. To what extent does the idea of ‘resilience’ translate across international, interdisciplinary, and theory/practice borders? What efforts are being lost in translation, and what opportunities for cooperation can be identified? This workshop hence seeks to map and bridge different streams of ‘resilience’-based research and policy.

This event will bring anthropologists, archaeologists and environmental historians into an interdisciplinary conversation about memory’s beyond human-centred and further than anthropocentric whereabouts. Scholars of genocide will be in conversation with scholars of the anthropocene to explore the potentially transformative social and political possibilities of ‘more-than-human memory.’

Queerness is, among many other things, change; therefore, a queer gaze needs to be aware of mutations and deviations. In their fundamental essay “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (2005), David L. Eng, Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz asked themselves a critical question: given all the achievements and the preponderance of identity politics in social, political, and academic discourses, what are the new paths Queer Theories should embrace? “The contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity —as a mass-mediated consumer lifestyle and embattled legal category— demands a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of different”, the authors claim (1).

The panels in this conference will be organised around critical debates currently taking place in the field of Queer Studies. The panellists will be invited to contribute to those debates by exploring the intersections between queerness and Hispanism.

A dance-theater piece designed for unconventional spaces or the street.

The event will offer a live experience, real instruments, and play-based knowledge with an expert. You will also have the chance to learn some Spanish, Nahuatl (“Aztec”) and other languages terms along the way

This one-day virtual conference will discuss and debate the possibilities of a feminist quantitative social science, and to learn from each other’s successes and difficulties in integrating feminist theory with quantitative methods. We also hope to advance a vision of feminist quantitative methods and research as not only interdisciplinary but furthermore committed to “ethical, collaborate, participatory, transformative, intersectional, accountable, accessible, and open” (Leung et al, 2019) production of knowledge.

Through a range of interdisciplinary papers delivered by international scholars, this conference will provide a platform for dynamic and engaging discourse that will consider relations between built interiors and exteriors from a variety of voices and perspectives.

Taking as its main prompt Mati Diop’s short film In My Room, made during the 2020 lockdown, this workshop will explore – through moody reading and collaborative creation – the impact of the pandemic on our sense of the spaces, and specifically the rooms, that we live and work in – some shared, others inhabited alone.

This conference will build upon that scholarship by focusing attention onto the dynamics of representing wonder (and wonders) in, across, and between media: in written genres such as chronicles, poetry, letters, handbills, and songs, how were physical marvels recorded, described, or reconstructed through language and literary form? Conversely, how did language shape physical processes of performance, craft, and construction in playscripts, alchemical writings, and books of secrets? What risks and opportunities did translation between media, modes, and genres present?

This conference seeks to rethink the literatures and arts of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persianate and Turkish lands through the presence of non-human animals situated within their ‘worlds’, whether these be pastoral gardens, constructions of the wild, or the interstices of human habitations.

Identity Abroad in Europe and the Mediterranean, 11th-15th centuries aims at exploring the construction, expression, and practical significance of various forms of ‘identity’ among those people who chose or were forced to live ‘abroad’ at least temporarily in Europe and the Mediterranean in the period between the eleventh and the fifteenth century.

Looking at ‘identity’ from within the lens of any single discipline is reductive: the theme is an inherently interdisciplinary one. By including contributions which utilise a diverse range of sources, approaches, and methodologies, and which relate to a wide geographical area and chronological span, the conference seeks to offer a multiplicity of perspectives on its theme as well as to foster discussions and working relationships among its speakers and attendees.

 The seminars will focus on landscape and allow us to ask questions about the division between culture and nature; the boundaries between countries and cultures; the agency of the nonhuman and more than human; the role of the supernatural and the imagination in shaping history; and the ethics of landscape management, naming, and ownership. 

This series of events aims to reflect on how distributed models of cognition apply to, and change our perception of, musical engagement. Growing interest in music-making practices outside the normative, and ideally sterilised, settings of the concert hall and the studio has already highlighted the extent to which ‘musicking’ creates living, distributed assemblages out of performers, listeners, instruments, and architectural spaces. In each session of the series, the academics, performers, and practitioners interviewed will share their reflections on the way the language and insights of distributed cognition engage and enrich models of aural encounter in fields such as music performance, environmental studies, history, religious studies, and literature.

This seminars series explores cross-cultural histories of food and drink production and transformation across the early modern world with a gender perspective. From the kitchens of the Caribbean, crossing the Atlantic to Cape Town and East Asia, these seminars invite us on a long-distance journey to examine particular food processing techniques and their social implications. In particular, these sessions aim to uncover the central role of women in the circulation of culinary knowledge, local practices and global food commodities in different regions.

This conference zooms in on four interrelated themes relating to the state and social welfare which are pertinent to today’s social and political climate: Covid-19; the future of work; citizenship and social rights; and health care.  The event will stimulate interdisciplinary discussion on social welfare, broadly defined, in an age of austerity from different contexts around the globe.

The aim of this conference is to both reveal how contributors have negotiated racism and racialization through turbulent political periods, and the personal impact of these forces, but also to celebrate identity and resistance, and in doing so provide a cultural uplift that will impel the event to be exciting and engaging for both academics and non-academics alike.

“The Week of Fake News” is a one-off large cross-sector initiative encompassing cinema, music, academic debate and fine arts. It’s objective is to investigate how fake news and media bias have impacted the democratic institutions and the election process in Brazil, drawing pertinent parallels to the UK and the rest of the world.

This interdisciplinary conference brings into dialogue diverse geographies, disciplines and approaches to reflect on the gender dimension of food and cooking in the crucial period of the early globalisation. We will look closely at the ‘making process’, as a highly gendered and embodied experience and as a form of production and transmission of ideas, skills and identities. Building on recent scholarship on ‘making and knowing’, we consider ‘making food’ as a framework to build cross-cultural stories of food and gender and, thereby, contribute to the growing field of food studies.

This symposium brings together key figures working on smell across the arts, humanities, and social sciences in order to establish what a field of ‘Smell Studies’ might look like – or whether it is in fact desirable. What might Smell Studies’ key concerns be? What could it contribute to the wider interdisciplinary project of sensory studies? Where are its roots and what does its future look like? These are the questions which this small symposium aims to answer.

This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to explore the history of saffron cultivation and use – both globally and more locally. The symposium is the culmination of a year-long project, under the auspices of the Materiality Research Growth Network, funded by the University’s Research and Collections Programme.  Working with colleagues in the Cambridge University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Botanic Garden herbarium, and a range of college libraries and archives, the convenors have investigated the Cambridge collections in order to develop existing scholarship on the long history of the local and global saffron industry, focusing particularly on cultural practices that developed around saffron use, its material properties (its colour, flavour, and medicinal properties), literary and visual representations, and the religious and political meaning attributed to this expensive commodity, from the Protestant campaign against the ‘saffroned’ ‘staine’ of Catholicism in 17th century Ireland to the ‘saffronising’ of Hindu Nationalism in India today.

This workshop will explore the cultures of socialist internationalism and solidarity that emerged during the Cold War, with a particular focus on how these practices functioned as a space of interaction between citizens and states across – and beyond – the Eastern Bloc. 

The panel discussion includes world leaders from the UK and the USA talking about the transatlantic experiences with covid-19 and debt. This includes Professor Frederick Wherry from Princeton and Mae Watson Grote from the Change Machine discussing the USA experiences, and Professor Karen Rowlingson from University of York and Dr Mia Gray from Cambridge highlighting the experiences of the UK from a social policy and geographical perspectives.

This conference will focus on arguments against empire deployed by those who resisted its authority in numerous colonial settings spanning Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Far East. Contributors will reconstruct the ideologies deployed by key intellectual figures embroiled in the process, including Pearse, Ambedkar, Gandhi, Nasser, Cabral, Fanon, Nkrumah and Khomeini.

Comics and the Global South will be a two-day conference devoted to exploring the intersections of comics studies and decolonial theory. With an emphasis on the comics form, its distribution, and its circulation, this conference is interested in probing the medium’s potentialities for producing decolonised knowledge and carrying out inter/trans-medial dialogues of South-South solidarity.

The conference attempts to question and challenge the idea that the advent of a cross-cultural comics scholarship requires Europeans to “cross borders.” Instead, we propose to reflect on how those “borders” have already been crossed during a long colonial history.

A closed workshop which will discuss what forms can the inner life take? How is it shaped through specific forms of embodied practice? While one’s inner life need not be understood as separate from one’s body or  senses, and the ‘outer world’, certain experiences are strongly felt to be private and inaccessible to external observers. Even if the inner life is ultimately ‘illusory’ (as Merleau-Ponty reminds us), it remains personally meaningful for many.

The objective of this conference is twofold: firstly, to restore visibility to the queer migrant in cultural, sociological, political, theoretical and methodological debates on globality and migration; and secondly, to challenge the socio-political and racialised narrativization of the queer migrant experience as a journey from the ‘backward’ global South to the ‘progressive’ global North. In so doing, this interdisciplinary conference will itself perform a kind of ‘queering’, rupturing stable, linear and Western conceptions of migration, and rethinking the ways in which queer bodies are perceived, represented and choose to move and travel through space.

‘Magic and Ecology’: symposium and art exhibition brings together historians, philosophers, and anthropologists of magic with environmental scientists, ecological thinkers, and practitioners of contemporary magical techniques. This symposium and art exhibit examines the ecological thinking in magic, in order to test the hypothesis that magic is not only a misunderstood phenomenon in industrialised society but an experimental technique inviting a politics of invocation and working-with that is much needed toda

Unlike one popular of idea of magic as the ability to change the world at will, this panel discusses the notion of magic as collaboration with non-human beings and investigates the significance of animism for the critical theory of Anthropocene discourse and practice. Why is ecological thinking today so interested in magic? What does “magic” mean in an environmental context? What practices are being described, and who practices them today? In this opening panel, anthropologist Richard Irvine and magical practitioner, author and artist Lupa introduce us to the relationship between ecology and magic. 

Western magic historically has been concerned with discerning connections between the human (microcosm) and the world (macrocosm), but modern magical practices digs deeper into these efforts of discernment. Faced with environmental crisis, what can magical techniques teach us about what it means to be a body entangled with other bodies? Lilith Dorsey and Sabrina Scott have both researched and practiced forms of magical entanglement, and in this panel they discuss witchcraft as an art of attuning to the real. 

How do we write the world and how does language change the shape of our stories? This panel engages the literary as literal spell work and examines contemporary nature writing as rites of passage and techniques for altering the power narratives that stories impart. Zakiya McKenzie and Victoria Whitworth are nature writers whose work challenges conventional ideas of how nature can – and should – be “written”. This panel explores how words are used in order to alter our perception of the objects they name. Can words re-enchant our relationship to the nonhuman? What are the ethics of “environmental” writing? 

Since the beginning of the modern witchcraft revival in the 1950s, witchcraft has often been understood as counter-magic that challenges the authority of “man” (anthropos) and of human reason. The oppression of human bodies, particularly those of ethnic minorities, remains connected structurally and historically to the oppression of earth and environment; the logic of witch-hunting remains with us and remains at the core of the climate crisis. Peter Grey and Geraldine Hudson are both authors and artists who have explored the political significance of witchcraft in the Anthropocene, and in this panel they discuss their own experiences of apocalyptic witchcraft and its role in in contemporary occulture, art and activism. 

Plants, animals and organic material have always played a hugely important role in magic. “Geomancy” is an ancient technique of divination used by consulting the earth (geos). This panel explores “landscape magic” and how human interaction with place affects thoughts, emotions and actions. How are these practices employed today and what can be learned from historical examples? Alexander Cummins and Josephine McCarthy are writers and practitioners with several decades of experience exploring the intersection of magical practice with ecology. 

This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars and activists working on and campaigning against authoritarianisms and right-wing attacks on democracy through a queer perspective. By queering authoritarianisms, we mean making visible LGBTIQ+ lives and politics which resist authoritarian and undemocratic politics.

Ships in the Proletarian Night, then, has three aims. First, to explore the history of Anglo-French Marxist encounters, enriching our understanding of the history of exchanges between the two traditions. Second, to consider the contemporary state of Marxist thought in France and Britain, dwelling on the recent revivals of socialist thinking and action in each context. Third, to explore the latent possibilities for new encounters in the future, considering how each tradition might enrich the other, casting new light on the pressing questions of the contemporary conjuncture.

This panel posits Marxism as a bridge, examining how revolutionary desires have fostered surprising and enduring encounters that cut across pre-established boundaries and walls. Robert Jackson examines Antonio Gramsci’s position at the nodal point between diverse socialist traditions, suggesting that the Gramscian lexicon has offered a lingua franca for Marxist discussion across the globe. Jackqueline Frost explores the development of an anticolonialist proletarian homosexuality, tracing the transnational connection forged between French communist Daniel Guérin, Jamaican novelist Andrew Salkey and Trinidadian theorist C.L.R. James. And, Giulia Champion probes how Marx’s monsters – his image of vampiric capital and were-wolf-like surplus value – have been displaced from their original context and integrated into the postcolonial Francophone world by scholars such as Édouard Glissant and Malcom Ferdinand.

The panel explores the versatile ways in which theory, praxis, and populism have intersected in constructing Marxist thoughts. Each of the papers analyse the past and present interventions, theoretical or otherwise, in altering the political movements and ideological framings of Marxist theory.

In his 1926 essay How Are Verses Made? Vladimir Mayakovsky poses the following question: ‘What basic propositions are indispensable, when one begins poetical work? First thing. The presence of a problem in society, the solution of which is conceivable only in poetical terms. A social command.’ This panel considers a number of solutions conceivable only in poetic terms. It brings together Emma Gomis’ examination of Marguerite Duras as a utopian, euphoric, idealist Marxist, Owen Holland on the importance of the Paris Commune for Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Wreck of the Deutschland, and Micol Bez on the translation and reception of C. L. R. James in France. This panel thus offers several ways to approach what Mayakovsky calls the ‘social command’ behind works of literature. 

This panel looks at configurations of the radical Left and figures in French Marxism and anarchism that have been overshadowed by their contemporaries and subsequent trends, especially, in the Anglophone tradition. Discussing the emergence of anarcho-feminism in the Paris Commune, Lucien Sève’s correspondence with Althusser, and Alexandre Mathéron’s Marxist reading of Spinoza; Lang Wang, Jacob Collins, and Nicholas Habash uncover side-lined voices on the Left. 

On this panel, twentieth-century British Marxism is the focus. Bringing together both marginalised and canonical figures, the panel puts particular emphasis on the influence of French figures in the British Marxist tradition. Miri Davidson’s paper explores on the influence of French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux on the London-based Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa in the late 1960s and early 1970s, examining how this exchange helped to shape the influential materialist feminist notion of social reproduction. Brendan Harvey recuperates the underread work of Christopher Caudwell, a Marxist cultural critic active in the 1930s whose critique of materialism retains theoretical and political value in the contemporary world. Finally, Vicente Montenegro Bralic reassesses Stuart Hall’s retooling of the British cultural studies project in the 1970s, tracing how Louis Althusser’s philosophy helped Hall articulate the relationship between class, race and colonialism in new ways.

One unexplored resource for thinking about the nonhuman is Greco-Roman religion and magic. This panel explores the relationship between place, power and bodies in ancient magic. How did specific landscapes embody spiritual beings? What was the role played by plants and animals in enabling the sorcerer to access secret powers? Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe and Esther Eidinow are Classicists with a special interest in the blurry line between nonhuman spirit-world and nonhuman creatures in Greco-Roman magic. 

The early decades of the twenty-first century have been profoundly shaped by the global financial crisis of 2008 and the recent COVID-19 recession. Yet, behind these crises are trends of global inequality that have, in Thomas Piketty’s sobering analysis in his 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, re-established is a dynastic ‘patrimonial’ capitalism. The papers in this panel offer other ways to grapple with the present moment. Niamh Mulcahy turns to Althusser’s aleatory materialism in an attempt to shed light on structures of contemporary inequality, Ariane Hanemaayer considers emergent biological forms of exchange, and Andy Higginbottom offers a new way to approach the transformation problem. 

David Abram’s seminal The Spell of the Sensuous (1997) argued that disdain for magic produced, in the West, a distorted rather than enlightened sense of the non-human world. Merlin Sheldrake’s recent work explores what Abram calls the “more-than-human” quality of nonhuman presences, and together David and Merlin examine what it means to live “humanly” in a more-than-human world of entangled lifeforms.  

This conference seeks to explore the politics and ethics of this way of organising labour from the perspective of the lived experience of the workers themselves. We will focus especially on qualitative and ethnographic work on how people feel about their own labour situation, how they build their own networks, what they consider to be the most important aspect of this new way of working, and how it fits with their lives and values. We hope to attract a broad range of activists, social scientists, social theorists and philosophers of platform capitalism to this conversation.

This conference seeks to create dialogue between two forms of expertise. It will bring together people with lived experience of mental health challenges and researchers, with the aim of starting conversations between these two groups of experts. We also recognise that many people belong in both groups.

This symposium aims at investigating different kinds of housing illegality in the West (Europe, Americas and Australasia) from the viewpoint of their interaction with the broader institutional framework in which they are situated. The multifaceted connection of informal practices in the field of housing with different layers of both public (e.g. planning and building laws, practice by street-level bureaucrats) and non-public (e.g. informal rules established by criminal organisations, shared social norms in specific informal environment institutions), and the resulting politics of housing informality are under scrutiny in particular. Additional inputs reflecting on the changing nature of housing illegality and meanings of legal housing at times of global pandemic would be considered.

The conference aims to touch upon key figures in the history of Kierkegaard’s reception in France from the 1930s to the present day. This conference is not only an intellectual survey of important moments in French thought but also an intervention in the way we understand the stakes of contemporary French thought, beyond the horizon of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger.

This conference will meaningfully contribute to the wider scholarly debate on the significance of early modern portraiture as pivotal sources for numerous branches of historical research and not just art history. It will both firmly enable this discussion and bring attention to this burgeoning field of interdisciplinary historical studies.

The conference will engage with varied methodological and analytical approaches to care through the work of scholars from public health, sociology, geography, anthropology, and economics. These discussions will open up space for reflection on the future of care – both a taking account of the implications of a care-less society and a utopian envisioning of a society built upon the foundations of care.

This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to re-assess the shape and make-up of classical culture in the context of the fourth-century transformation of the literary, philosophical, and theological past of Greece and Rome. The structure of the event is conceived as an experiment in form.

This conference, which develops out of our series of seminar workshops, aims to reinvigorate approaches to academic work in its relation to creativity, ethics and pleasure. It will explore cutting-edge work that brings praxis and research into contact in creative ways.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), this conference will examine Rorty and his contemporary relevance. 

This conference invites reflection on the intellectual history of particular ideas of national and international development.

Media of Hate will bring together scholars from the fields of early modern literature, religious studies, history, musicology, and art history in order to explore the various media used to communicate and represent discrimination and distrust towards religious minorities across early modern European contexts, from Dutch Protestant and French Huguenot refugees, to Jewish communities, and Catholic recusants.

This will primarily be a closed conference.

This conference aims to scrutinize the literary, political, and philosophical relevance of reworking/unworking tragedy in cross-cultural contexts. It takes up the notion of ‘tragedy’ in a world shaken by global conflicts, deterritorialization, and migration crises.

This two-day interdisciplinary conference will bring together historians, sociologists and current professionals to discuss how counselling has changed, how its practices have shaped reproductive health, and what its histories can tell us about practices today.

This conference seeks to initiate a multidisciplinary conversation on climate change, as conceived by, and re-inscribed within, Indigenous literatures.

This interdisciplinary conference brings together academics from the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences as well as museum professionals and artist-practitioners to investigate the understudied tensions between the representational power of the pineapple and the political contexts of its production around the globe, thereby making connections between the global and local which are at the heart of contemporary debates about the nature and origins of the food that we eat.

This conference is the first attempt to begin to reconstruct the story of the way Cambridge — university, colleges, and town — became a sanctuary for persecuted academics from Fascist Europe in the years 1933-1945. Papers will range widely across the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences, both focusing on well-known refugee academics and also drawing attention to the experience of those marginalised or neglected: students, women, and scholars who never found their way here professionally. We will also look at the individuals, institutions and households that enabled escape and rescue, as well as at the evacuation from Nazi Germany to Cambridge of material resources of scholarly value.

This workshop will build on existing research of the role of primary care in reducing inequality, bringing together post-graduate students and early career researchers who have an interest and experience in inequality and health with interdisciplinary researchers, and working towards defining an academic network and future post-doctoral research project.

Join us for the first in a series of discussions as part of the Social Power and Mental Health: Evolving Research Through Lived Experience conference

This online panel will explore how mental health survivors/service users have been responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The conference will serve as an open archive, documenting discussions, exchanges, and interventions in order to produce a publication that will arise out of these “commons ateliers”. We invite speakers and participants who are interested in re-imagining the commons today to join us in this collective endeavour. 

This conference seeks to explore how such diverse perspectives can inform a new ethics of adoption and the care of orphaned or abandoned children in Muslim communities. It will bring together scholars, professionals and others concerned, with an eye towards bridging the gap between academic knowledge, social work, and public education.

Conference Programme

This two-day international workshop explores the myriad roles played by women – as volunteers, organisers, bureaucrats, politicians, writers and citizens – in shaping the emerging ideologies and structures of independent India.

This conference will investigate the imaginative landscapes of Islamist politics, through a focus on aspirations, dreams, and critique articulated within trans-regional or national Islamist political milieus.

This conference will focus on how digital tools and resources are used in education and learning, and how we can explore a real opportunity to strengthen the matrix of research, technology and education.

The European upheaval of 1848-9 brought a great number of refugees from Hungary to the Ottoman lands. This workshop aims to examine the lives and deeds of some of these Hungarian men and women, whose extraordinary accounts of their experiences have recently been brought to light.

This two-day conference aims to generate engaged, imaginative, and creative scholarship on work.

This event will explore the dynamics of Jewish-Muslim interaction in the performing arts across the Maghreb and France from 1920 to 2020, through the production of creative enterprise, performance and content, and the ebb and flow of influences.

This conference will bring together historians, political scientists, and policy experts for a high-level discussion of the continued deployment of French miliatry forces on combat missions in Sub-Saharan Africa

This conference seeks to tackle head on the challenge of talking openly about death, enabling dialogue between experts from different fields, as well as between academics and wider publics, with the aim of augmenting contemporary understandings of dying well.

This one-day conference brings together students, academics and practitioners from both the global North and South in an attempt to tease out the politics of social protection.

This symposium will bring together a group of distinguished scholars working in Britain, Spain and the United States to confront Spain’s political past, present and future. 

This symposium, organised by lgbtQ+@cam, revisits trans and queer as a disruptive technologies of gender, identity and thought, and will celebrate the freedom of ‘moving across socially imposed boundaries from unchosen starting places’ (Stryker, 2016).

This conference will facilitate interdisciplinary engagement with historical narratives of toleration and religious freedom.

This will be a closed event. 

This two-day interdisciplinary workshop will focus on the regulatory challenges associated with low-income, high-debt consumers.

On the twenty-first birthday of Art and Agency, this conference will explore Alfred Gell’s notion of the exuvial in all of its multiplicity and richness.

This conference will bring together academics and practitioners from philosophy, politics, and law to debate what lies beyond marriage.

This two-day international conference will bring together doctoral students and early-career scholars to discuss the different ways energy is and has been intertwined with economic, social, cultural and political developments and processes.

This conference aims to showcase the diverse forms of contemporary protest art that have emerged around the world over the last few years in a single interdisciplinary forum.

This conference brings new perspectives to Islamic discourses on ethics during the pre-modern period across the disciplines of law, theology, philosophy and adab.

This event is a closed workshop. It aims to provide a space for conservation researchers to engage with critical and social and environmental accounting researchers. We hope that this new interdisciplinary bridge will set off theoretical elaborations, as well as concrete working relationships and future experimentations of accounting for the management of ecosystems innovations that can ultimately lead to better achievement of ecological and social results.

This conference brings together leading scholars from various disciplines, including development economics, political science, geography, and sociology, and encompasses various themes of relevance to global economic governance, including trade, finance, and development. The conference will take a broad look at the shifting ground in the global economic governance architecture, and highlight the most promising avenues of inquiry for future research.

The objective of this workshop is to address the question of 'adaptive capacity' in a much broader framework across a wide range of scales and empirical contexts. The workshop will bring together anthropologically-minded researchers in diverse areas of research, such as in the sciences, environmental economics, global studies, food and resource studies and human geography.

This conference will contribute to a more thorough history of the present by providing insights into the enduring impact of mid-century techno-science on our contemporary information landscape. It aims to help us understand the antagonisms and synergies that animate the multiple offshoots of cybernetic thought, including operations research, AI, rational choice theory, predictive analysis, design thinking, behavioural economics and risk management.

This conference seeks to address the complex set of pressing issues that international law and the international community have faced in view of a series of crises that have taken place on the territory of Ukraine since February 2014. The conference will gather leading experts in international law, political science, information policy, and cyber security.

The aim of this conference is to explore the issue of elites in democratic thought from these founding figures of 'elite theory' to the present. Bringing together intellectual historians and political theorists, this will be the first conference devoted to charting the trajectory of this most pressing of political dilemmas from its modern inception in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century through today’s crises.

This event is a closed workshop. It aims to encourage and consolidate new work on developments in Western poetics and literary theory from antiquity to 1700. The project provides a variety of outlets for the most exciting and compelling research in the field, and hopes to foster a community of scholars working on the subject across traditional disciplinary, national, and period boundaries.

This conference will bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to evaluate the theoretical and practical implications – and importance – of predictive processing and related ideas (such as the Bayesian brain hypothesis, the free-energy principle, and the importance of ‘top-down’ influences on cognition more generally).

This conference aims to examine the emergence, utilisation and transformation of comics, caricatures and animation in relation to epidemic disease, and the prospects and risks of their use in epidemic prevention, preparedness and control. ​

This conference is an opportunity to consolidate and advance our understanding of the post-truth phenomenon by bringing together scholars across disciplines. At the conference’s core is the view that this is a moment of ‘knowledge controversy,’ namely, a rupture of the naturalised order that provides a window onto the norms, practices, and power relations supporting that naturalised order.

This is a closed event. Further information is available on the conference page.

Beyond the most obvious characteristics of the Reformation, the long sixteenth century also faced a number of fundamental reforms in the religious, legal, and economic fields. This workshop explores how such ideas and programmes were actually implemented on a local basis.

This event is a closed workshop. Further information is available on the conference page.

A conference by the Limits of the Numerical Project.  Construed broadly, commensuration involves equating units or entities judged in the first instance to be essentially different and incomparable with one another.  Such operations of same-making – along with corollary processes of differentiation and distinction – are fundamentally generative aspects of sociocultural life, and have proven to be highly fecund as both objects and optics of analysis across the social sciences and humanities

This conference brings together researchers across multiple disciplines interested in new spaces of resistance and protest that have opened up in Latin America in recent years. Bringing together leading scholars working on Latin America and resistance, the conference will draw out emerging research agendas and discuss a range of related questions.

This event is primarily a closed workshop. The workshop will focus debate on concrete, practical solutions that can inform future European Union policies.

This conference brings together students of Indian history, politics, languages and society to examine India’s political ideas through a close ethnographic and historical scrutiny of the languages used by its people to speak about and act within their political lives.

This two-day symposium aims to address the subversive intents and contestatory acts, the legacies and lessons, of Surrealism, especially as they bear on politically charged questions of sexuality, gender, race and nationality. The keynote lecture will be given by Professor Susan Rubin Suleiman.

What happens when hearing doesn't do what it purportedly should?  

Often hearing and sound are predominately considered from an ear-centric perspective. We will explore alternatives to this singular ear, engaging various historical, theoretical and methodological positions. Putting forward an exploratory format, participants will ignite discussions that challenge notions of embodied presence and investigate different materials and research strategies for hearing differently from the 19th century to the present.

There has been considerable and sustained interested in cooperatives across the humanities and social sciences. Yet these approaches, which centre upon their status as economic organizations, political projects, and sites of meaning and value-making, remain largely siloed within specific disciplines. This workshop seeks a more sustained and coherent interdisciplinary theorizing of contemporary and historic cooperative practice.

This conference aims to bring together scholars from disciplines such as anthropology, history, economics, epidemiology, political science, literature and theology to chart the forms and places of morality in global health.

During the past decade, the rise and sprawl of digital media has ensured that interconnections between different visual, aural, and oral modalities have acquired much greater cultural prominence. This conference aims to bring together both those who produce multimodal ‘translations’ as well as those who theorise about them. By encouraging truly inter and trans-disciplinary dialogue, the event aspires to impact on research directions in the area of translation and multimodality.

A symposium by the Limits of the Numerical project. Drawing together perspectives from the disciplines of anthropology, English, philosophy, political science, and sociology, the workshop will  provide an opportunity to critically reflect on the power and limits of interdisciplinary research in metrics.

This two-day conference will bring together an international group of experts in intellectual history, the history of religion and literary studies. It will represent the first attempt undertaken by scholars to view ‘priestcraft’ from a pan-European perspective.

This two-day conference brings together historians, demographers and other social scientists from France and Britain working in the field of reproductive politics. 

Sessions will identify similarities and differences between political, religious and medical contexts on both sides of the channel as well as leading actors and their networks. Presentations and discussions will explore how various aspects of reproduction are privately experienced, publicly debated, legally regulated and scientifically and medically managed.

The Digital Publics and Counterpublics Workshop, jointly hosted by the Centre of Governance and Human Rights, and CRASSH, will critically explore the ways that new digital technologies are progressively being incorporated in everyday practices in east Africa and the socio-political impacts this has had.

This conference seeks to foster an experimental cross-disciplinary conversation about the ways traps and allied technologies serve as the medium for humans’ conceptual and practical engagement with other species.

This conference aims to explore the interdisciplinary, shared traits of diagrammatic thinking so as to go beyond the notion of simplification, of “drawing information together”, which forms the usual analytical ground for understanding syntactic visualizations in the sciences and humanities. Rather than seeing diagrams as systems of linkages, the aim of the conference is to explore the dialectic of inscription and erasure as an inherent and generative trait of diagrammatic practices.

Bringing together historians, art historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and scholars of comparative literature and Islamic studies who work on Islamic communities all across the globe, our aim is to analyse how Muslim travellers, scholars, state officials and migrant workers made sense of radically different forms of practical piety and religious thought they encountered while being on the move. This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to compare and connect such encounters as they occurred in various spatial and temporal settings since ca. 1250.

Within the evolutionary social sciences – however mature – there is room for exploration, for new methods, and new approaches. This conference gathers together researchers working at the cutting-edge of the field, and will open dialogues on the as-of-yet unanswered issues at the heart of social science and cultural evolution. 

Focusing on music and the other arts, this conference seeks to bring together some of the unique stories of transformation from the vastly different regions that made up the Soviet Union, but also to draw out emerging patterns and common trends. 

This conference aims to enlarge substantially our understanding of the dialogue between 19th-century music and natural science, examining in particular how a scientific-materialist conception of sound was formed alongside a dominant culture of romantic idealism. It takes as its subject sound as matter and medium, focusing on the domains of natural science, emergent technologies, sentient communication and acoustics.

This conference will bring together scholars and researchers in ecology, politics, geography, anthropology, cultural history, and history and philosophy of science to explore how aesthetic, economic, and moral value came to be attached to the diversity of life on earth.

This conference will explore the diverse ways in which technoscientific innovations in epigenetics, bio-banking and regenerative medicine challenge and redefine traditional life course models.

This conference is the first of its kind in its specific focus on the epistemological and related methodological challenges associated with researching South-South development cooperation. The conference will invite researchers on SSDC – from graduates and early career scholars to leading figures in the field – to reflect critically on the changing politics of knowledge and knowledge production that these actors and trends present.

This conference aims to bring into dialogue scholars working in a variety of fields—Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, African Studies, Economic History, Historical Anthropology, Visual and Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies—in order to grapple with the discursive, visual, and material realities of slavery, the slave trade, and enslavement by other names and legal categories in the Spanish colonial sphere.

This symposium will provide the opportunity for a comparative inquiry into the ways in which key aspects of the conquest and colonisation of Latin America by Europeans have been represented and transmitted in writing, in visual culture, and in performance culture down the centuries and across a range of national cultures.

The workshop will discuss how labour is organized in different contexts across Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe, and what effects such organization has on labour relations under conditions of economic precarity.

This conference explores the socio-material interfaces where waste meets politics in the present. It brings together a group of established and emergent waste scholars from across the social sciences to discuss the contemporary dynamics of waste and waste labour in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Five themed panels – on infrastructure, labour, circulation, elimination and reconceptualization– provide a structure through which waste will be explored in all its complexity.

This workshop will examine the questions that climate change and other environmental issues raise about the conditions of possibility for reproducing human and non-human lives in the present and future. There will be a public lecture by Dr Carrie Friese (London School of Economics).

This conference will combine intensive closed workshops with two public events on the topic of the assessing inequality. The first public event will be a keynote address by a leading scholar in the field: Professor Alice O’Connor. The second will be a round-table aimed at engaging with current practice and policy, engaging with a wider academic and non-academic public, and bringing into the conference other perspectives, debates and questions.

A two-day international conference bringing together scholars of different disciplines to consider the relationships between theology, religious practice, political theory, and political practice in early nineteenth-century Germany (and German-speaking central Europe).

Shari’a in Motion, a conference, aims to bring together a diverse group of scholars working on varied aspects of Islam, law and authority, for discussions on method, mobility and meaning in the study of shari’a. Taking the broadest possible approach to 'shari’a,' we seek to explore how seeing shari’a as always in motion – in time, in space, through text, language and the operations of meaning – allows new perspectives and methods to emerge for the study of Islam and Muslim societies. 

The Moral Psychology Interdisciplinary Conference aims to identify the most recent theoretical and methodological research challenges in morality research from various disciplines.

At this conference (held a year before the U.S. election), UK and international academics will explore the degree to which and how a new U.S. president might alter the global political landscape, and the scholarly frameworks for exploring this topic.

This workshop will include contributions on political, moral, and religious forms of leadership in the region and the global South Asian diaspora. Participants will consider what makes South Asia’s leaders acceptable or even intensely desirable in their followers’ eyes.  

The speakers at this conference will put forward a selection of the very different answers to questions about human nature. Their responses are drawn from the perspectives of psychology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of medicine, social and biological anthropology, evolutionary theory and the study of animal cognition. We will understand why we disagree about human nature, and what, if anything, might resolve that disagreement.

This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars from the sciences, social sciences and humanities in order to address material practices of mimesis.

This conference will be an occasion to exchange ideas about the state of digital editing and its future potential.

This one-day symposium is centred around interdisciplinary responses to Professor Samuel Scheffler’s recent book Death and the Afterlife (Oxford, 2013).

This conference brings together scholars interested in material culture, and curators from across the arts and sciences, to reflect on both questions of methodology and public policy. 

This conference aims to bring those with an interest in Parker together for the first time, to encourage work bridging existing fields of Parkerian study and setting aspects of his career into their full context, and, as a result, to present for the first time a new and coherent picture of a major figure in mid-sixteenth-century English (and Continental) intellectual and religious life, bringing into particular focus Parker's role in collaborative scholarship and the retrieval of the past.

This conference brings together representatives from criminal law, philosophy, and medical and social sciences to examine the idea of the responsible person in the criminal law.

This event will bring some of the key players in the book trade together with academics from a range of disciplines whose work approaches that circuit from different perspectives: literary and cultural studies, sociology, book history and digital humanities. 

The conference will bring together leading academics from across different disciplines in the humanities to address artistic responses to financial crisis from the beginning of the twentieth century to today, focusing particularly on the 2008 crisis.

The world today faces a crisis of responsibility. This workshop explores the deep social roots of this crisis through a comparative investigation of different cultural orders of responsibility.

In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the ways in which colonial encounters between Europeans and Africans were fraught with anxiety. This conference will engage scholars from history, development studies, anthropology, geography, sociology, law, and other disciplines in a new conversation on anxiety across time and space.

This conference will bring together historians, economists, literary scholars, political theorists, geographers, demographers, and philosophers who will share their views on Malthus and Malthusianism in and for his own centuries, and for ours, a century defined by accelerating public debate on environment, population, and food security. 

This conference will explore the widely discussed topic of historical and contemporary Chinese migration, both within China and abroad, but in less studied regions and from new perspectives.

In this symposium we aim to unpack the multiple contemporary connotations of the term ‘psychosomatic’ and to render them available for discussion in relation to problems of agency, responsibility, motivation, choice and self-management.

This conference will focus on the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the implications that this will have for future U.S. foreign policy. Sessions will focus on the global challenges facing the next president, the role that a president can personally play in an international context, and the state of the 2016 campaign itself.

In 2018 the social movements leading up to and inspired by 1968 will be fifty years old. This conference will act as the foundation for a significant new volume on Women and 1968 to be published early during the 50th anniversary year, in order to help found a new discourse that emphasizes women’s broad and varied participation in and influence on the revolutionary politics of 1968 (where discourses to date have tended to focus exclusively upon the women’s movement and individual cases of “aberrant” violence).

This is the first annual conference of the ERC-funded project 'Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic'. It will bring together social scientists, historians, historical geographers, urbanists and epidemiologists to discuss and disentangle the interrelation between bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis) and the urban environment in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Framing and staging have historically been powerful metaphors with which to negotiate collectivity. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.

Issues of security and conservation repeatedly draw public attention to the practical problems faced by curators. Questions of repatriation and human remains draw public attention to the ethical issues faced by curators. But the job of curator also raised fundamental intellectual questions that neither the academic not the lay public are led to think about. 

This conference aims to generate a cumulative account of the 'everyday nature of justice'. We invite theoretically grounded papers offering ethnographic insights into the plural nature of 'everyday justice' across the globe.

Questions of the total archive cannot be answered from within any one discipline: they engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of political high modernism and the technolotgies of information retrieval. 

This conference will bring together scholars working in departments of English, Modern Languages, Classics and Art History to look at the many different places of early modern criticism. 

The focus of the conference is on the many varied actors pursuing visions of justice in Africa – their aspirations, divergent practices and articulations of International and vernacular idioms of justice.

The conference will bring together scholars in History, Literary Studies, Visual Studies, Anthropology and other associated disciplines working on newspapers and periodicals in societies across the colonial world in order to explore common themes and reflext on the place of the newspaper in colonial societies.   

The conference aims to explore the ways in which heritage can promote, secure or undermine sustainable development in Africa, and in turn, how this sustainable development affects conceptions of heritage in Africa.

This conference explores new perspectives for the study of intellectuals. It will investigate how new theoretical and methodological approaches can reinvigorate the study of intellectuals.

What happens when material objects transition between different contexts – geographical, cultural, and temporal? Diverse scholars, curators, and creative voices will meet to explore this theme, around the world and across the millennia.

This interdisciplinary conference is the first dedicated to the musical sublime, c.1670–1850. Spanning the eras of Lully, Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner, this period witnessed dramatic changes in musical praxis alongside the rise to prominence of the philosophical and aesthetic category of the sublime.

Which aesthetic and cultural concepts inform the creative effort invested in its translation and adaptation? Drawing from various national and cultural traditions, film and literary scholars will come together to establish what divides and unites the erotic in diverse contexts. 

The conference aims to facilitate dialogue between academics and artists/practitioners across the many disciplinary areas of sound studies.

The conference will explore attempts to assess the social, political and economic costs of alcohol consumption in Britain.

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to consolidate an emerging international community of scholars interested in the history and/or philosophy of measurement.

The conference addresses the ways in which six non-European powers – Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Afghanistan, China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia (Iran) and Siam (Thailand) – engaged with European imperialism and struggled to keep their sovereignty.

This conference aims to further our understanding of the role of the venereal diseases in influencing the fertility of populations in the past.

This conference aims to explore the different facets by which cinema and the moving image contribute to our understanding of cities and its topographies.

Weaving together salient themes from Politics and International Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Economics, Law, Sociology, History, and Anthropology, and drawing in experts and practitioners from these fields, this conference will offer theoretical and empirical insights into contemporary Iraq.

This two-day conference aims to return human experience to the centre of medical discussion by bringing scholars of the body from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences together with medical and surgical practitioners. 

The Speaking Ethically Across Borders project aims to address situations in which people recognize the existence of distinct ethical traditions and attempt to act or think ethically in light of those traditions, without collapsing the distinction between them.

The conference aims to bring together leading economists, political scientists and historians to debate a key tenet of modern development theory: the crucial link between the development of strong institutions and sustained economic growth.

Public lecture part of the conference “Institutions and their Discontents: Rethinking Economic Development in South Asia”

The primary aim is to further interdisciplinary discussion of the relationship between the aesthetics, ethics and legal implications of new digital technologies through exploring the various ways audio-visual media are created, received and interpreted.

This conference will offer historians, anthropologists and postgraduate history students a unique opportunity to share and strengthen their scholarship within a cross-disciplinary research network concerned with the crucial relevance of applying theories of visual anthropology to the study of contemporary South Asian history.

The central approach of the conference is to promote cross-disciplinary scholarly exploration and conversation on purity, impurity, and disgust.

The aim is to open the concept of scientific ‘capacity’ in Africa through a conversation between natural scientists and doctors, anthropologists and historians, providing, respectively, experiences and projects, ethnographic observation and historical investigation.

This conference addresses issues related to the value socially conferred to plants as resources that are both material and immaterial.

The aim of this conference is to bring together people with a range of research interests and from a range of disciplines and subjects to reflect the way in which different sorts of enquiry relate to and orient themselves toward writing and written objects of different kinds.

This international conference will provide the first opportunity for scholars, journalists and activists from Argentina, the UK, the US, Greece, Spain, Egypt, Tunisia and beyond to compare the challenges faced by the Latin American movements with the experience of mobilizations for similar demands in the Arab world and Europe since 2011.

This discussion-based conference aims to reconsider the growth of a parish system in the Latin West in the middle ages. We will confront and contrast disciplinary traditions and create unexpected encounters between different narratives of parish formation.

The aim of this two-day conference is to engage with selected manifestations of the sacred in the contemporary world. The focus will be on victimhood and sacrifice.

Posture is a key signifier of spiritual and psychological states in Dante’s Comedy. We aim to investigate the way in which these postures communicate by means of a range of interdisciplinary approaches.

The aim of this conference is to analyse the contribution of summitry to the peaceful ending of the Cold War, compared with other more structural factors such as military pressure, economic change and social transformations.

This conference addresses issues currently at the forefront of European politics and collective identities, namely the tendency of major states to fragment, a process which started at the beginning of the twentieth century and has acquired momentum in recent years.

This symposium brings together researchers from across the humanities to address the enduringly troubled relationship between writing and ‘work’.

The conference will explore changing conceptions of the relation between philosophy and the special sciences over the past century. We are interested in how, as philosophers of science in a European context, we got to where we are now; and in how we should be thinking about where we go next, in the evolving relationship between science and philosophy.

Right across the spectrum of Greek and Chinese studies there is an increasing realisation of the benefits to be gained by adopting a comparative approach. Only by using such an approach can the distinctive features and commonalities between these two civilisations be identified.

The conference will establish a four-way conversation between musicologists, historically-informed performers (including the professional viol consort Fretwork and singers from the many excellent College choirs that perform this repertoire regularly), literary scholars, and historians of the church, bringing together an entirely new group of people currently working on the same slice of English culture in the late 16th and early 17th centuries but from different perspectives. It will aim to explain why, as the Elizabethan composer Thomas Morley put it, the verse anthem was able “to draw the hearer, as it were, in chains of gold by the ears to the consideration of holy things”.

A Mellon CDI Conference

This conference aims to investigate the ways in which visual research methods support the development of new perspectives on modern South Asian history.

Our inter-disciplinary conference brings together Classicists, historians of ancient Judaism and of early Christianity in an attempt to take stock of this changing scholarly landscape, and with ancient Christianity as its principal focus, explore ways in which that movement both reflected, differed from and changed the cultural, social, religious and political background of the time.

The conference aims to investigate how we might understand and theorise space in relation to the digital image.

In recent years, the promise of emancipatory democratic statehood has inspired uprisings, revolutions, and unilateral interventions into other nations' affairs. 'Democracy' appears to be a cherished value for the actors in such situations. Yet ethnographic research is making some intriguing discoveries in this regard. Growing numbers of former pro-democracy activists in emerging democracies such as Indonesia or Kenya have come to view the democratic ideal with suspicion or disdain, perceiving it to be inherently ineffective or morally flawed. In the established democracies of Europe and North America, apparent advocates of democratic principles now seem to be tacitly renouncing them in favour of technocratic managerialism, and ‘apathetic’ forms of citizenship. Why? Our conference aims to solve this puzzle.

Performance as a paradigm repositions the intelligibility of works of art as a function of their mixed and multiple audiences: simultaneously implied and actual; individual and collective; past and present – audiences which precede, as well as follow, acts of creation. Performance as an angle of approach asks who an artwork is for, assuming a multiple and complex answer. It views all artworks as implicitly public forms of messaging, or rather, suggests a view of the work as time-specific gesture rather than object, however individually created or consumed. As Simon English said of his land art project ‘England’ on BBC Radio 4, ‘The artwork is us discussing it now.’

Latin America currently stands at a crossroads. The demise of neoliberalism as the hegemonic ideological force across much of the continent has led many inhabitants and observers of Latin America to publicly reopen fundamental questions as to the future and direction of the region and its nations. Democracy, citizen participation, participatory budgeting, human rights, resource nationalization, and pan-indigenous projects have all, at varying moments and in different ways, been invoked as fundamental principles for forging a new ideal future. At this critical juncture, a re-examination of the role of idealist visions in Latin America’s political programs and cultural production can reveal the multiple entanglements and implicit assumptions underlying these visions.

This symposium celebrates the life and work of J B Trend, the first Professor of Spanish in Cambridge, and a central figure in the history of Hispanism.

The conference seeks to bring anthropological, historical and public health perspectives on ‘event’ and ‘process’ as two aspects of infectious disease outbreaks in an interdisciplinary dialogue.

The aim of AUM2013 is to report and review new model applications in assessing policy options in an economically and financially uncertain world. We would like to focus on flexible and adaptable urban development that demands system-level thinking. The symposium welcomes all model types and styles, from conceptual experiments to practical policy appraisal. The scale of models may range from megalopolitan, metropolitan, city, urban district to neighbourhood. Because of its direct policy relevance, we welcome a broad academic, professional, policy-making and local community audience. We also aim to devote a third of the session slots to papers by young researchers and graduating PhD students – their papers will be placed in themed sessions along with those by leading scholars and practitioners.

This conference brings together social scientists, gender scholars, sexologists, psychiatrists, historians of science, as well as mental health practitioners and sexual rights activists to critically explore the sexual classifications produced by the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental Disorders (DSM), published in May 2013.

The aim of this conference is to further our understanding of the ways in which knowledge was exchanged between Europe and the Ottoman Empire during the period from the conquest of Constantinople to the Treaty of Passarowitz.

Relations between human reproduction, divinity and sacred space are at the centre of this interdisciplinary conference.

The purpose of this conference is to explore the changing contours and future trajectory of intellectual history on both sides of the Atlantic.

Third Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment

This conference will allow a comparison of the political and ethical debates over medical and cultural innovations in ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘reproduction’ over the period 1950-1970.

This one-day workshop will explore the particular relationships between Naples, violence and religion in the early modern period and later historiography.

This one day conference seeks to bring photographers with experience in covering infectious disease outbreaks together with medical historians, anthropologists and public health experts in order to engage in a dialogue regarding the past, present and future of epidemiological photography.

In this conference, our contributors look at the question of whether cognition itself occurs solely ‘in human brains’, or whether cognition should instead be properly thought of as occurring partly in embodied action, or partly in extra-bodily artefacts (Clark and Chalmers 1998).

A major, two-day international conference reconceptualising modernist artistic practices from a transnational, interdisciplinary perspective.

This conference seeks to explore the representation and conceptualization of interior space in cinema, in the context of the transnational relations and identities that inform both spaces and the films that project them. The conference will examine the idea that the intimate architectures of homes and dwelling places, whether of a transitory or more rooted nature, both shape and are shaped by the identities of those that inhabit them.