CALL FOR PAPERS: ‘Beliefs Under Pressure: Religion, Community and Identity in the Early Modern World’

10 September 2015, University of East Anglia

This one day conference will provide a lively and informal forum where graduate students and early career researchers can discuss ideas about the social and cultural history of religion and community, c. 1500-1800. Particular emphasis will be placed on varied modes of communication across the period, and different ways in which identities were formed, contested and transformed. We welcome proposals for papers lasting no more than twenty minutes, particularly those that promote innovative methodologies and the use of interdisciplinary tools and concepts.

Please submit an abstract of 300 words and a brief CV to beliefsunderpressure@gmail.com

Deadline: 6th July 2015

Themes addressed may include, but are not limited to:

• Religious practice and the development of religious identities 
• The Reformation and the Counter Reformation 
• The nature of Dissent and dissenting communities 
• The Restoration and its impact 
• Toleration and co-existence 
• Eighteenth-century religiosity 
• The “Secularizing Process” and the Disenchantment debate 
• Regional tensions & conflict with authority 
• Migratory communities 
• Life-writing 
• Functions and practices of correspondence 
• Secrecy and the spread of illicit information 
• Networks and Network formation 
• Digital Humanities 
• Memory and emotion 

The conference will run 9:30-18:00, followed by dinner. Students and researchers who wish to attend as peer reviewers without submitting a paper are also welcome – just send us an email. In addition to the traditional conference environment this event is also dedicating time for open discussion of papers and themes, making it a worthwhile experience for attendees and speakers alike.

This event is being organised and run by Sarah Hall and Tory Lewis from the School of History at the University of East Anglia.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Grace in literatures in English

19 June 2015

This one day conference organised by the English Department at Queen Mary University of London (http://www.sed.qmul.ac.uk/english/index.html) aims to address grace in literatures in English across periods and genres.

Grace has been an influential and contested term in literary studies. More loaded than elegance or charm, grace has been idealised, rejected, appropriated, and misused. Grace, as it relates to literary production and interpretation, can be both a quality and a function of the text—it can be bestowed upon the writer or reader, or it can be inherent in the text. At a time when there is increasing pressure in the discipline of literary studies to measure itself in quantitative terms, this conference asks whether grace (as a quality or effect of writing and reading) can frame a defence of the study of literature. Or is grace as a value limiting, anachronistic, or irrelevant in a postmodern, secular world?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Different meanings of grace (ethical, aesthetic, stylistic, theological) 
• Changing concepts of grace over time 
• Grace as an ideal in literature 
• Grace and artistic inspiration 
• (Mis)use of grace as a means for exclusion or control, for instance in a colonial or postcolonial context
• Grace as inherent or learned and performed, given and received or earned and acquired 

As a prelude to a series of talks and workshops at the University of Oxford, culminating in an interdisciplinary conference and publication on grace in all its cultural manifestations (Summer 2016), we are offering an exploration of grace in literatures in English.

Dr Susan Jones, the convener of these projects, will be giving a keynote address.

Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted to a.effe@qmul.ac.uk and l.e.gwynn@qmul.ac.uk by 30 January 2015.

Organising Committee: Alexandra Effe, Lotte Fikkers, Lucy Gwynn, Melissa Schuh, Andrea Thorpe, Lottie Whalen, and James Williams

Book Launch, Colin Howson, 'Objecting to God' (CUP)

I am pleased to announce that Colin Howson, an emeritus professor of the
LSE department of philosophy, will do a talk about his latest book. You
are all cordially invited.

Regards,

Luc Bovens
Professor
Head of Department
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE

Friday, May 4 in T206 or LAK206 from 4 to 5:30, followed by a reception
on the first floor of the Lakatos Building

Objecting to God (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

The growth of science and a correspondingly scientific way of looking at
evidence have for the last three centuries slowly been gaining ground
over religious explanations of the cosmos and mankind's place in it.
However, not only is secularism now under renewed attack from religious
fundamentalism, but it has also been widely claimed that the scientific
evidence itself points strongly to a universe deliberately fine-tuned
for life to evolve in it. In addition, certain aspects of human life,
like consciousness and the ability to recognise the existence of
universal moral standards, seem completely resistant to evolutionary
explanation. In this book Colin Howson analyses in detail the evidence
which is claimed to support belief in God's existence and argues that
the claim is not well-founded. Moreover, there is very compelling
evidence that an all-powerful, all-knowing God not only does not exist
but cannot exist, a conclusion both surprising and provocative.