Repurposing Enlightenment (ACLA 2021)
Repurposing Enlightenment
Virtual ACLA seminar for this coming spring (April 08-11 2021).
Olivia Sabee (Swarthmore College) and Hanna Roman (Dickinson College)
The seminar is entitled “Repurposing Enlightenment,” and we invite interested parties to submit a proposal. A description of the seminar is posted below this message.
The deadline to submit an abstract October 31, 2020.
Abstracts of up to 1,500 characters (spaces included) must be submitted through the ACLA website at the address linked here.
Inquiries may be sent to Hanna Roman: romanh@dickinson.edu.
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Repurposing Enlightenment (seminar description)
“The Enlightenment has long been understood as a break from past practices and traditions, as a period in which reason, science, progress, secularization were invented. Instead, we seek to understand the Enlightenment and the values identified with it not as rejections of the past or sudden revolutions in thought, but as reconsiderations of earlier ways of knowing. These instances of repurposing include both translations of older sources and traditional thought practices into new contexts as well as the proliferation, amplification, and replication of eighteenth-century ideas.
We would like to revisit the Enlightenment through the lens of the following questions: How did examples of repurposing and sustaining the past constitute active and crucial parts of Enlightenment knowledge-making? What actions did creators and compilers of knowledge take in gathering, organizing, and transforming texts, ideas, and images that gave these sources novelty and new purposes? How did sources today considered to be traditional and perhaps even fictional —ruins, religious texts, fables and mythology— contribute to the meaning and shape of knowledge in the Enlightenment? We encourage submission of papers that focus on the active processes of repurposing, whether via studies of plagiarism and copying, translation (including movement and adaptation of texts and ideas across national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries), reuse of images or symbols, or historiography.”