A Call for Applications to the Humanities Center Residential Research Institute at Dartmouth College September 23- November 30, 2002

This multidisciplinary forum will bring together selected Dartmouth faculty and scholars from other US and foreign institutions to pursue research related to the topic of "Conversion."

The Institute will be directed by Kevin Reinhart, Professor of Religion, and Dennis Washburn, Professor of Japanese. The aim of the Institute is to explore the concept of conversion as it operated during the 19th and 20th centuries in the Ottoman domain, India, and Japan. Although the term "conversion" has strong religious connotations, it may also be viewed constructively in larger terms as a political or ideological process: conversion as a form of cultural appropriation through the forced adoption by subordinate groups of dominant discourses, customs, or institutions; conversion as a redefinition of spatial categories--East-West, rural-urban, empire-colony; conversion as a reordering of social classes or a blurring of ethnic and gender categories. The extensive literature on religious conversion will prove useful in analyzing these types of socio-cultural transformations, since nationalism and other modern ideologies both partake of religious "moods" and secularize them. Recent scholarship on conversion also recognizes that often not just the converted, but the converter is changed--a transformation that demonstrates the complex, sometimes contradictory outcomes of cultural and ideological adaptation.

Fellows: External Fellows will receive a stipend of $5,000 and will be expected to contribute to an edited collection that will emerge from the work of the Institute.

Applications: For further information and application information please contact: URL: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/converting.html
E-mail: sandra.gregg@dartmouth.edu
Mail: Humanities Center Institute, c/o Sandra Gregg, Dartmouth College, 114 Wentworth Hall, Hanover, NH 03755-3526

Deadline for applications: January 31, 2002