Call for Graduate Participants: “Indisciplines of Enlightenment: Firsts, Origins, Foundations” (seminar, July 19-22, 2012)

We seek graduate student participants in an interdisciplinary summer seminar co-organized by Adriana Craciun (UC Riverside) and Ian Duncan (UC Berkeley) at UC Berkeley, July 19-22, 2012. The seminar, “Indisciplines of Enlightenment: Firsts, Origins, Foundations,” is part of the UC Multi-Campus Research Group on “The Material Cultures of Knowledge 1500-1830” (materialcultures.ucr.edu). Confirmed faculty participants include Amir Alexander, David Bates, Adriana Craciun, Ian Duncan, Darcy Grigsby, Sarah Kareem, Janet Sorenson. (Other faculty participants to be confirmed …)

“Indisciplines of Enlightenment” aims to reconfigure our disciplinary histories in light of recent work on the cultural, geographic and historical legacies of empire, science, travel and exploration in the global eighteenth century and its plural Enlightenments. Invoking the early scientific voyages of exploration of La Condamine, Maupertuis, Cook, La Perouse, Humboldt and Darwin, our seminar seeks to answer two questions that have not previously been addressed collaboratively in any extensive way. 1) What are the relations among concepts of the first, of the origin or original, of the foundation, in Enlightenment discourses? 2) Looking at modern disciplines in relation to one another, and specifically through their shared preoccupation with their own disciplinary origin myths and with firsts of their kind, how can we rewrite twenty-first century trajectories of disciplinary innovation and integration?

We aim to publish a special issue of a scholarly journal devoted to “Indisciplines of Enlightenment,” to which faculty and graduate student participants would have the option of contributing work emerging from the seminar. We would fund UC participants’ travel, accommodation and meals while at the seminar. We are happy to consider a limited number of self-funded graduate students from outside the University of California system, but due to funding restrictions in those cases we could not provide travel or accommodation costs, and would ask for a $150 registration fee to help cover the cost of conference meals, which would be provided for all participants. Graduate students from across the humanities and social sciences and from all UC campuses are invited to apply by emailing a CV and 1-2 paragraphs stating how this seminar connects to and would benefit their research plans, to the seminar organizers (adriana.craciun@ucr.edu and iduncan@berkeley.edu) by May 1, 2012. Further details available at http://materialcultures.ucr.edu/summer-seminar/