Collecting the Unconscious: Reflections on Sleep and Dreams

Graduate Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/ghf.htm

The Graduate Humanities Forum, a graduate student-run division of the Penn Humanities Forum, is hosting its 5th Annual Conference on Thursday, March 3rd and Friday, March 4th, 2005.

The Forum seeks conference proposals on this year’s topic of “sleep and dreams.” We encourage a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the notion of sleep. In this symposium, we welcome proposals that consider any facet of sleep and/or dreams, and we offer the following suggestions as inspiration:

• Insomnia and somnambulism
• Troubled Sleep: existentialism, bad faith, and the unconscious
• Surrealism and its relation to sleep states
• Magic realism and transitions of consciousness
• Nightmares
• Medieval dream visions
• Nocturnes
• “I have a dream”: Dreams, race, and double-consciousness
• Day dreams: the unconscious and the imaginary
• The political unconscious
• Psychoanalytic approaches to the unconscious (e.g. Kristeva)
• Dreams and the subversive discursive
• “Sleep aids”: sleep, pharmacology, and altered states
• Dreams and gender
• The sleep of reason
• Dream poetics
• Sleep disorders
• The politics of sleep
• Lucid dreaming
• Prophecy, divination, or the oracular dream
• “Brain in a vat”: from Descartes to _The Matrix_

We encourage presenters to consider these issues in light of their own research or academic interests. In addition to formal papers, we encourage proposals for panels, group discussions, short seminars, or workshops. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be emailed by January 20, 2005 to the e-mail address provided below. A committee from the Graduate Humanities Forum will evaluate all proposals, and notification of acceptances will be emailed by February 7, 2005.

On Thursday evening, there will be a convocation and keynote address by Christine Stansell, Princeton. There will be panels and other sessions on Thursday and Friday. All area graduate students, regardless of year of study and field, are invited to participate.

About our keynote:

Christine Stansell is professor of history at Princeton University, where she teaches American women's history as well as courses in the Program in the Study of Women and Gender. She has long written about women's history, feminism, sexuality, and cities. Her books are City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986), the anthology Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (1984), and American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000). Her review essays about American history and literature appear regularly in The New Republic.