This conference will bring together scholars from numerous disciplines to consider the multifaceted representations of the body in early modern Italy, ca. 1300-1700. Configurations of the body in the visual arts, literature, and theory (philosophy, theology, medicine, and other disciplines) suggest numerous intersections of gender studies with investigations of early modernity. Consideration of the body as either metaphor or physical presence can ground discussion of such topics as political theory, poetics, the physiology of real and imagined or speculative bodies (the maternal, the embryonic, the impaired, distressed, or possessed, the confined or banished, the monstrous, the demonic, the sacramental), the body as part or whole, identity or otherness, as matter in its relation to senses, spirit, soul, or mind, the body as vehicle or obstacle to knowledge, the history of the imagination and the emotions, the aesthetics of beauty and grotesquerie. Researchers from a variety of disciplines such as history, art history, literature, history of science, religion, or medicine, or political theory are invited to submit abstracts of 250 words and a one-page cv by 30 March 2002. Contributors will be notified by 30 April 2002.

Organizers: Julia L. Hairston and Walter Stephens