Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds

Call For Papers: We will hold THREE jointly sponsored sessions in 2019. FIRST: With Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World & Violence and Representations of Violence, we plan a session on The Experience of Pain: Body, Sense, and Violence. This session especially invites papers exploring the following: a) whether pain is construed as a separate sense, or as part of touch, what role tactility (the capacity of touching or being touched) plays in the experience of pain, but also how pain relates to and/or affects, other senses; b) how the experience of pain shapes the body and the self, either in relation to the making of an individual pain narrative, changing the body physically (scarring, illness, disability), or the way in which pain is distinct from questions of identity around illness and disability c) how the experience or threat of pain effects social interaction between self and other, especially the fact that pain is often accompanied by discourses or practices of violence. SECOND: With Prayer in Antiquity, we invite proposals for a session on how sensory perception is described and experienced in early Jewish and early Christian prayers, and on the impact of the material environment on the senses during prayer. Papers are invited to engage one or more of the following questions: How do prayers use language about the senses to express how ancient communities thought about or ascribed meaning to the senses, and what can this tell us about their social and cultural practices pertaining to the senses? Also what does this convey about their theologies and beliefs concerning the divine? What impact did material objects and space have on the sensory experiences accompanying prayer? THIRD: With Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity, we will host a panel on Refining Sociorhetorical Interpretation, in which presenters from different disciplines will address the role of mental images and embodied experience in dialogue with the analysis of rhetography in sociorhetorical interpretation.

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