Call for Papers: The Feuilleton, the Public Sphere and Modern Jewish Culture

November 18-19, 2019

Jerusalem, Israel

The Feuilleton Project, an initiative organized by faculty at Michigan State University, the Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, invite papers from scholars based in Europe and Israel for a conference on the Feuilleton, the Public Sphere and Modern Jewish Cultures. The conference will be held on November 18-19, 2019 at the
Hebrew University, Jerusalem (more details about time and location to follow).

In the nineteenth century, the feuilleton became a major cultural, literary and political genre in newspapers across Europe and beyond. Feuilletons appeared in French, German, Russian, Polish, as well as Jewish languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Arabic. By the early twentieth century, the feuilleton was a key site for discussions of national character, portraits of urban life, and aesthetic innovations. It was also increasingly perceived as a Jewish form by Jewish, non-Jewish, and anti-Semitic writers.

This conference will explore the feuilleton as a meeting place for journalism, politics and literature; a locus of urban culture; a site of negotiation for transnational identities; and a rich topic for the digital humanities. We welcome papers from history, literary studies, cultural studies, journalism and other related fields and encourage a wide range of geographic locations, theoretical, disciplinary and linguistic approaches.

All presentations should focus on a specific text or set of texts that are related to the feuilleton. The conference will include sessions with 20 minute papers, and workshop sessions with 10-minute presentations about specific texts followed by extensive discussion. Texts will be presented in the original language, with selections translated into English.  Organizers will cover the costs of travel and lodging.

Please submit an abstract of 250 words, including details about the feuilleton text(s), to Naomi Brenner (brenner.108@osu.edu) by 20 September 2019.

Call For Papers, Sessions and Roundtables

Jewish Borders in the Middle Ages

IMC 2019, University of Leeds, 6-9 July 2020

The 2019 International Medieval Congress at Leeds, focusing on medieval materialities, featured two keynote presentations, and thirteen panel sessions devoted to topics in Jewish studies plus at least seven additional panels with individual papers on Jewish topics, making the IMC an ideal venue for scholars working on any topic relating to medieval Jewish history, literature, art, or archaeology throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, to come, present their work and exchange ideas.

Next year’s Medieval Congress at Leeds (July 6-9, 2020) will feature “Borders,” broadly conceived, as its special strand.  See the general CFP at: https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc2020/  for further information and instructions how to submit papers or panels.  Not all proposals must address this topic in order to be considered, however, it seems an especially rich one for scholars working on Jewish topics.

Explorations of various types of medieval borders have often begun with or centered on Jews in some way: Jewish relations with non-Jews as examples of negotiating the borders between religious communities and representing religious difference in the written and visual cultures of the Middle Ages; the role of Jews in securing or establishing political borders, for example in medieval Iberia or Khazaria; Jews as intermediaries between multiple cultures of learning; Jews as traders, travelling across the borders of land and sea,  and in the process, political, cultural, linguistic and economic borders as well; Jews as part of the symbolic imaginary of Christians or Muslims in their representations of not only actual Jews, but of everything from animals,  other forms of social, religious, or gendered difference, or eschatology

Jews, of course had their own borders. Even as Christians represented Jews literally or symbolically on the borders of their illuminated manuscripts, choir stools or churches, so too did Jews express their views of Christians in their own manuscript images, and of internal boundaries of gender, age, and social status within the Jewish community.  In addition to having to negotiate the boundaries between themselves and other religious communities, they also had to contend with difference within the Jewish community; the most obvious being between Rabbanite and Karaite, but other internal differences based on variations in customs, legal interpretations and liturgy across geographical borders, or between different social strata within the Jewish community. Geographic boundaries, borders between the divine and earthly realms, between human and animal likewise feature in Jew literature. Much has been made of the imaginary or hermeneutical Jew in Christian writings and to a lesser extent Muslim ones, yet one may also ask what if any imaginaries did medieval Jews themselves use as tools with which to interpret the world around them?

Scholars are invited to contemplate and contribute proposals to any of these subjects or others relating to borders and medieval Jewish cultures, or to other aspects of medieval Jewish life, history, or cultural production.

Deadline for individual papers:  August 31, 2019  https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/proposals/proposal-forms/paper-proposal-form-2020/

Deadline for panels: September 30, 2019

https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/proposals/proposal-forms/session-proposal-form-2020/

Deadline for roundtables: September 30, 2019

https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/proposals/proposal-forms/round-table-proposal-form-2020/ 

Questions regarding the Jewish studies strand at the IMC, contact: Alexandra Cuffel alexandra.cuffel@rub.de

Call for Papers for the Judaism Panel at the 20th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture in Chester, UK, 11-13 September, 2020

Judaism is famous for its permeating boundary drawings between dos and don’ts in its religious, ritual-like, and otherwise identificatory acts. Simultaneously, it is famous for keeping its number of heretics at a minimum, often reduced to Jesus, Aher, Tsvi, and maybe Spinoza (e.g. Biale 2002). One should think that many boundaries would generate many heresies in resistance to the identificatory bonds that not only bind, but even constrict. This does not seem to be the case in Judaism. Still, Judaism defends its boundaries like any other culture and has its arsenal of processes by which it others internal transgressors into material and cultural states of unintelligibility.

In line with the overall theme of “transmutations and transgressions” for the 2020 ISRLC conference, the Judaism Panel invites papers willing to analyse and reflect on religious, literary, and cultural examples of transgression in the course of Jewish history and thought. It encourages papers that consider what local material and cultural intra-actions brought Jews to transgress or defend Jewish laws, norms, configurations, and expectations. What were the effects of such transgressions? What theories coupled with situated knowledges might explain why some transgressions provoked processes of othering, sanctions, and violence, while other transgressions were perceived as transmutations of benefit to Jewish culture and in some cases even enabled Judaism to survive and thrive?

Please send proposals and abstracts (around 300 words) and a short bio to Associate Professor in Jewish Studies, Dr. Marianne Schleicher, ms@cas.au.dk. The deadline for submissions is 1 December 2019. Speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference. If you are submitting to another panel as well, please give a hint about that.

For more, see the conference website: http://isrlc.org/conference