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The Global Enlightenment

April 6-8, 2017, Princeton University

The Global Enlightenment

Princeton University
April 6-8, 2017

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Abstracts

Keynote Speakers “Translation and Catastrophe” Anna Brickhouse University of Virginia In “Translation and Catastrophe,” I explore the role of translation and mistranslation in responses to the Lima and Lisbon earthquakes of the eighteenth century. In doing so, I sketch a different temporal and geographic frame for the story of Enlightenment.   “Superseding Historical Injustice? Enlightenment’s…

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Schedule

THURSDAY, APRIL 6 EAST PYNE 010 FRIDAY, APRIL 7 MCCORMICK 106 SATURDAY, APRIL 8 MCCORMICK 106   << Home

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Speakers

Keynote Speakers   Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia, English) Anna Brickhouse is the author of Transamerican Literary Relations in the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2005) and The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560 – 1945 (2014). Her first book was the recipient of the Gustave Arlt Award for…

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The conference aims to scrutinize unexamined legacies of the Enlightenment from a global perspective. Until recently, the long-eighteenth century (c.1660-1820) was understood as the historical era during which the West became secular in its intellectual, cultural and political institutions. But over the past two decades, scholars have radically redefined Enlightenment both as concept and epoch.

Our Global Enlightenment symposium seeks to advance the terms of this critical intervention by bringing the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific regions, and India into conversation with American and European perspectives. Our goal is to put leading scholars working in different regions of the globe in conversation in order to generate a collaborative, global conversation.

We anticipate addressing such themes as ongoing conflicts within Christianity and other major world religions; and the existence of pluralism both within and as a result of global Enlightenment movements.We focus on understanding both religious conflict and global exchange as defining aspects of how modernity gets constructed during the Enlightenment period and beyond.

Some questions that motivate the conference include:

  • Once we have eliminated the inaccuracies and limits of former historical narratives of Enlightenment, where do we go?
  • How do we begin to reassemble intellectual history in the face of a conceptual frame that is as complex and fragmented as it is axiomatic?
  • By questioning the legacies of Enlightenment, can we also find insights into the present, particularly the ever-pressing concern of how religious fundamentalism across the globe competes with and interrupts our understanding of enlightened modernity?
  • THURSDAY, APRIL 6TH:
    4:30-6:00 PM
    EAST PYNE 010

    reception to follow

    FRIDAY, APRIL 7TH:
    9:00 AM-5:30 PM
    MCCORMICK HALL 106

    reception to follow

    SATURDAY, APRIL 8TH:
    8:30 AM-5:30 PM
    MCCORMICK HALL 106

    Sponsors

    Office of the Dean for Research (Innovation Fund for New Ideas in the Humanities), University Center for Human Values, Institute for International and Regional Studies, Center for the Study of Religion, The Office of the Dean of the Faculty, Department of English, Council of the Humanities

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