***DEADLINE EXTENDED*** CFP: "Judaisms, Jewishness, and Time" - Jewish Studies Graduate Association Conference (online)

CFP: "Judaisms, Jewishness, and Time"

11th Annual Jewish Studies Graduate Association Conference (online)
Borns Jewish Studies Program
Indiana University, Bloomington

Proposal Submission Deadline: November 14, 2022

In The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1951), Abraham Joshua Heschel says that “Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” With Heschel’s reflection on the centrality of time to Judaism in mind, the Jewish Studies Graduate Students Association at Indiana University invites graduate student proposals for a conference on Judaisms, Jewishness, and Time. We invite participants to consider how might Jewish studies as a field be positioned to interrogate time as a concept. This conference will be held February 2-3, 2023, online with an optional in-person reception and closing event.

Proposals are encouraged to think through questions that relate to how contemporary studies of Jews, Judaisms, and Jewishness offer new perspectives or rescue old concepts in the understanding of time throughout history. How can Jewish studies illuminate questions about time? How do the societies, organizations, or figures we research deal with temporal problems? We welcome proposals that engage/discuss Judaisms, Jewishness, and time in myriad ways, such as memory, narrative, and mourning; history and historiography; modernity, coloniality, and the nation-state; indigeneity and deep time; calendars, materiality, monuments, and ritual; ecology and climate change; the experience of time and other phenomenological issues; messianism and prophecy; or other topics.

The conference is open to all graduate students working in Jewish studies and adjacent fields. As an interdisciplinary conference, we welcome papers from many fields, including but not limited to Religious Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Music, Literature, Folklore, Film Studies, Visual and Performance Art, History, and Political Science. Also, we encourage the proposal of unconventional presentations, including visual, musical, and performance arts.

We are excited to announce that this year’s Lillian Solotkin Keynote Lecture, titled “Memory Citizenship: Migration and Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Germany,” will be given by Dr. Michael Rothberg, 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Please send an abstract (maximum 300 words), a title for your presentation, and contact information, including name, email address, telephone number, and institution to jsgsacon@indiana.edu by November 14. Abstracts will be evaluated based on quality and fit. Participants will be notified of acceptance by November 30. Papers will need to be submitted by January 9 for circulation among faculty respondents. Participants will have 20 minutes to present.

Please email questions to jsgsacon@indiana.edu.