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This year’s conference will examine the role of mortality and the consciousness of finitude in German culture and history. Death generates an array of responses, both creative and destructive, and plays a crucial role in the history of German thought and artistic practice. The graduate students of the German Department at the University of California at Berkeley welcome scholars from across the disciplines to submit proposals that address the intersection of mortality, culture and intellectual history in Germany.
We are open to submissions in any time period from the medieval to the present. Possible areas of investigation include but are not limited to:
Aesthetics and mortality
Cinema, mummification and death
Tragedy
Apocalyptic narratives
Death and transcendence in the visual arts
Metaphor and euphemism
The sublime
Death on screen
Commodity and death
Black humor
Vampirism
The death drive
Finitude and transcendence in philosophy
Romanticism and German idealism
Phenomenology and death
Ideology and finitude
Utopia and finitude
Mortality and subject formation
Mortality and ethics
War, mass death and trauma
Memory and memorial
Decadence and decay
Medical and scientific discourses on death
The language of the conference is English, but submissions in German are also welcome. In some cases we may be able to provide a travel subsidy. Please mail or e-mail a one page anonymous abstract with a separate cover sheet indicating your name, affiliation, address, phone number and e-mail address to: Address below.
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