Conferences
15–16 July 2018, International Society for Heresy Studies, London
Third Conference of the International Society for Heresy Studies
Following two successful New York City conferences in 2014 and 2016, the International Society for Heresy Studies announces a Call for Papers for its third biennial conference to be held June 15-16, 2018 in London. The conference theme will broadly focus on how borders between heresy and orthodoxy are created, maintained, and imagined. Although we interpret “heresy” primarily within a religious context, we also interpret it broadly enough to include the “heretical” in politics, art, philosophy, and literature. The study of borders—a popular theme in academic conferences in recent years—feels even more urgent in the current time of rising nationalism and political promises to ban immigration and erect walls based on imagined boundaries. Borders are, of course, more than lines drawn across maps and between religions; rather, they are blurry spaces of ambiguity and reversibility where identities are constructed and deconstructed. Concepts of separation, threshold, and border have occupied theologians, philosophers, historians, and artists since ancient times and remain dynamic elements in the work of many theorists and creative artists today. The reexamination of borders can demonstrate not only how we have constructed the heretical other, but also can reveal the fragility and arbitrary nature of our own orthodoxies.
While we encourage proposals relevant to the conference theme, we also encourage panel, seminar, and roundtable proposals on all topics related to heresy. We welcome submissions from scholars working in literature, religion, history, theology, art history, philosophy, political science, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies or any other attendant discipline, as well as from creative writers, artists, musicians, and performers whose work might be appropriate to the conference theme.
Abstracts should be sent to Suzanne Hobson ([email protected]) or Gregory Erickson ([email protected]) by March 1, 2018.
Potential subjects include but are not limited to:
- Migrants, nomads, vagrants, and refugees as heretics
- Borders, crossings and space/place
- Xenophobia and Islamophobia amidst globalization
- Heresy, hospitality and the stranger
- Radical theology and borders
- Belief and unbelief; sacred and secular
- Borders between the material and the spiritual
- Political theology, heresy, and borders
- Heresy and mapping
- The representation of the marginal, peripheral and that beyond Europe
- The demarcating or blurring of generic or disciplinary boundaries
- Political boundaries and national identities
- Refugees, border-crossing, exile and migration
- Historicizing the categories of “East” and “West” within the context of heresy and orthodoxy
- Iconoclasm: past and present
The International Society for Heresy Studies is an organization founded to support the study of the meanings, functions, and histories of heretical belief systems, especially their expressions in literature and art. The Society further aims to illuminate the legal, artistic, social and moral ramifications of blasphemy and iconoclasm, as manifested in literary and artistic works. It also encourages scholarship on non-God-centric secular visions, and it fosters inquiries into atheist critiques of theism. Finally, the Society supports work that tries to determine what happens to blasphemy and heresy when religion is conceived in more material terms such as ethnicity, tradition, ritual, or lifestyle.
The Society does not promote the study of heresy in order to advance Christian (or other theistic) apologetics, nor does it seek to explore heretical, blasphemous, or atheist views in order to condemn them. It equally does not agitate against religion but invites contributions to the understanding of heresy, blasphemy, and unbelief from both believers and unbelievers.
