BODIES

February 25-27, 2010

Sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Asian Studies, the Confucius Institute at USC, and Women’s and Gender Studies

Directed by Jeanne Garane, Jie Guo, Yvonne Ivory, and Ed Madden

Plenary Speakers:
Shigehisa Kuriyama, Harvard U, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Peter McIsaac, York U, German

A lot has been said about bodies, yet the body still remains one of the most contested concepts in a wide range of fields, such as art, anthropology, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, religion, as well as the study of gender and sexuality. Thinking about bodies has occasioned ongoing encounters, clashes, and border-crossings between these disciplines.

The Program in Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina invites submissions to an interdisciplinary conference entitled “Bodies,” to be held in Columbia, SC, February 25-27, 2010. We welcome papers and panels that examine bodies from any angle, and we especially encourage cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

the ghostly body
the anorexic body
the medical body
bodies and biotechnology
the self-destructive body
the religious body
the Oriental body
racialized bodies
emotional bodies
animal bodies
cross-dressed bodies
transgendered bodies
invisible bodies
viewed bodies
philosophies of corporeality

corpses
the “undead” body
robots & cyborgs
the disabled body
the thinking body
the body in the arts
the body as metaphor
bodies of knowledge
loving bodies
corporeality and writing
body modification
border-crossing bodies
speaking bodies
bodies and the grotesque
bodies “East” and “West”

Please send 300-word proposals and short bios to jieguo@sc.edu and yivory@sc.edu by November 15, 2009.