Call For Proposals: The Princeton Early Text Cultures Workshop
What: Graduate Workshop
When: April 16th 2016
Where: 202 Jones Hall, Princeton University
Organized by Mercedes Valmisa (mvalmisa@princeton.edu)
The Princeton Early Text Cultures Workshop is a multi-disciplinary and comparative project created for discussion of common and similar text types and practices across ancient and pre-modern text cultures.
The Early Text Cultures Workshop looks into the patterns of emergence of common text types across different parts of the Ancient World, including Egypt, China, India, Greece, Mesopotamia, and the Levant. In particular, the workshop tries to understand the intended audience, the social contexts of textual production and transmission, the structural patterns and performative features related to each of the text types and practices.
We will bring together eight graduate students as speakers in an interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars of pre-modern text cultures. Four of the speakers will present their analysis of sample texts from Early China, each representing a different textual type, and the other four will present counterparts to these text types from other early civilizations. Speakers will be paired according to their discussion materials, and each pair will work together to give a joint presentation at a thematic and comparative panel designated for the specific topic. Speakers are expected to communicate and work collaboratively with their matched colleague prior their joint discussion. The event will be divided into four panels of one hour and half of duration each, prioritizing the open discussion and the comparative dialogue over the individual presentations.
We provide travel expenses, lodging and meals for all speakers.
We are currently looking for graduate students working on early civilizations other than China to match with our China projects. If you work on Ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, India, Egypt or any other early textual culture, and are interested in comparative analysis, please contact Mercedes Valmisa at mvalmisa@princeton.edu.
