[URBANTH-L]ANN: Interdisciplinary Colloquium: National Scholarship and Transnational Experience (North Carolinal)

[Angela Jancius]

Interdisciplinary Colloquium: National Scholarship and Transnational
Experience: Politics, Identity and Objectivity in the Humanities and Social
Sciences

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
April 6th-8th, 2006

This upcoming colloquium will bring together scholars and graduate students
from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss the relationship between
nationalism and transnationalism in the development of the humanities and
social sciences in Europe. The presenters will place new transnational
approaches in historical perspective and will consider how transnational
experience, ideas, and contacts have influenced the production of 'national'
knowledge. The participants will cover a wide range of fields, including
anthropology, archaeology, ethnology, folklore, history, literature,
philology, and philosophy. The public is invited and welcome to attend!

In the last two centuries, the nation has been a guiding concept in the
practice of the humanities and social sciences. Nations have constituted not
only institutionalized categories and topics of study, but also the dominant
sites of specialization within many of the disciplines. At the same time,
however the same scholars working in national or even nationalist contexts
have invariably engaged colleagues, ideas, and issues beyond the frontiers
of the nation-state. Whether grappling with far-reaching world events or
confronting cleavages in their own societies, these scholars have found
their national frameworks consistently under threat by transnational
impulses. The result has been a complex and problematic relationship that
remains salient today, even as some scholars recognize that nationally-based
research does not fit the contemporary reality of intellectual, human, and
capital flow among countries.

In response, a number of humanities and social science scholars have begun
adopting various global or comparative ways of thinking about their
respective disciplines. While there are some clear differences among these
approaches, they all share a more transnational orientation that is critical
of the biases and limits of national categories and that makes the national
perspective itself an object of study. Both the shape and scope of these
trends may be relatively new, but the relationship between "national"
scholarship and its transnational context has long been a crucial factor in
the development of the disciplines.

While the national influence upon these disciplines has received in-depth
attention from scholars in a number of fields, the transnational component
remains underexplored, even as it informs much recent scholarship on the
history of the humanities and social sciences. This interdisciplinary
colloquium, sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Center
for European Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and the Kenan Fund of the
Department of History at UNC Chapel Hill, considers the relationship between
national scholarship and transnational experience.

We are pleased to have Martin Jay (Professor, Department of History,
University of California, Berkeley) delivering the Opening Address: "Can
There be National Philosophies in a Transnational World?" Other participants
include Karen Hagemann, Richard Handler, J. Laurence Hare, Jr., Jonathan
Hess, Young-Sun Hong, Johanna Jacobsen, Konrad Jarausch, Philip Kohl, Kader
Konuk, Lloyd Kramer, Suzanne Marchand, Patricia Mázon, Michael Meng, David
Pan, Damani Partridge, H. Glenn Penny, Jennifer Schacker, Justin Stagl,
Philipp Stelzel, Katie Trumpener, and Till van Rahden

MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~johannaj/nationalscholarship
CONTACT: hare at email.unc.edu or johannaj at sas.upenn.edu
J. Laurence Hare, Jr. and Johanna Micaela Jacobsen
Department of History
Hamilton Hall, CB #3195,
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195
Phone: (919) 962-2115
Fax: (919) 962-1403
Email: hare at email.unc.edu
Visit the website at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~johannaj/nationalscholarship