CFP: Renaissance Borders

Annual Princeton Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference
Princeton University, April 13-14, 2012

From the beginning, conceptualizations of the Renaissance have been
concerned with borders: between the classical past and the modern present;
between pagan and Christian; between the civilized and the barbarous. Even
as the idea of the Renaissance has endured various critiques over the past
half century, this attention to borders has only intensified. In current
debates about secularization and periodization in Renaissance studies, the
boundaries between past and present and between the sacred and the profane
have taken on a newly charged intensity. And these period-specific border
disputes relate to more general questions in the humanities today: the
future of interdisciplinarity; the role of material culture in the study of
art; political theology and the development of the liberal state; and
Jacques Ranciere’s reading of aesthetics as a “distribution of the
sensible.”

We invite graduate students from across the disciplines to submit abstracts
addressing the issue of borders in the Renaissance, broadly conceived. Topics
of interest might include:

- - National territory, identity, and art

- - Marginalia

- - Relations between the disciplines

- - Levels of style, genre, and class

- - Periodization

- - Secularization

- - City and country

- - Economic, political, and aesthetic distribution

- - Citizen, human, creature

- - Exceptions and emergencies

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to
renaissanceborders@gmail.com by February 1, 2012.