Histoires de la sexualité et de l'érudition

Histories of Sexuality and Erudition: Institutions, Texts, Practices

Call for Papers


Princeton, New Jersey, USA – May 10–11, 2019



This two-day workshop will explore links between sexuality and the lived practices of knowledge production across different contexts and cultures. How have conceptions of sexual difference and institutions of research and learning inflected each other? What role has sexuality played in the material and embodied constraints that shape knowledge production and transmission? Scholars have explored these questions—notably, in recent work on classical reception studies, gender in the history of science, and histories of humanism—and current work in progress continues to carry these approaches into other subfields.

In this workshop, we will bring together scholars from different fields to examine diverse, historically contingent cases at the juncture between the history of sexuality and the history of scholarship. Discussion will emphasize the historical and conceptual links between these cases, transcending lines of region, chronology, and specialization. In this way, we hope the workshop will further the development of individual projects and facilitate new collaborations.

We welcome contributions from scholars at any career stage, and about all times and places. We consider a diversity of papers and panels a concrete goal and not mere formal openness. We also encourage contributions from scholars who do not identify as intellectual historians or as historians of sexuality, but who have encountered the field’s challenges in their own work. More important is that papers are historically focused, with identifiable intellectual and institutional contexts that can be clearly explained to participants who have little or no prior knowledge of the subject.

This two-day workshop will be held at Princeton University on May 10–11, 2019. Papers of around 5,000 words will be pre-circulated two weeks in advance of the event. Participants will be organized into thematic panels. Each participant will provide an opening statement before workshopping feedback. The workshop will end in a concluding discussion moderated by two senior scholars.

Possible themes include, but are by no means limited to:

• Pedagogy and pedagogical literature
• School discipline
• Childhood
• Coeducation
• Classical reception; canon constructions
• Morality, theology, and religion
• Space and architecture
• Archives and libraries
• Laboratories and experiments
• Bibliography
• Shame, stigma
• Gender, sexuality, and the law
• Circulations (of sexual practices, of identifications)
• Aesthetics and identity
• Sociability and sexuality
• Practices (of sex, of education)
• Ethnography and its ethnographers
• Epistemologies
• Erudite sexualities and asexualities

Those wishing to participate should submit a maximum 300-word abstract and a short (~150 words) bio, and any questions, to emr2213@columbia.edu by February 1, 2019. Hotel accomodation and meals will be provided. Funds will also be available for travel, although they may not cover full transportation expenses Further information will be provided on the conference website, sexualityerudition.wordpress.com, as it becomes available.

Conference organizers: Paul Babinski (German, Princeton), Benjamin Bernard (History, Princeton), Emily Rutherford (History, Columbia).