ESSCS 2019

The Afterlife of the Object

European Summer School in Cultural Studies

University of Copenhagen, 18-22 June 2019

CALL FOR PAPERS

An object causes passion, as in the figurative notion of a loved object. “The Afterlife of the Object” 2019 summer school will contemplate how we establish narratives of the past and the self through objects.

We will view objects, not only loved, but also hated, ignored, collected, thrown away, performed, written, rewritten, translated, lost and found. The “object” of our study will be considered broadly, including but not limited to art, books, collections, fetishes, poems, letters, song, and beyond.

For example, in “The Daughters of the Moon,” Italo Calvino imagines the afterlife of earth’s only permanent natural satellite when she has she become too old and worn to be seen as “full.” Calvino’s story is a troubling allegory on consumerism, ecology, gender, destruction and desire, written in the ripe year of 1968.  

In Slaves and Other Objects (2004), the classicist Page duBois looks at our erasure of slaves as an idealization of the afterlife of ancient Greece, resulting in a collective blind-spot (a de-realization) that has fed and still feeds troubling views on race, including America’s nostalgia for the antebellum South.

Han Kang's 1997 short story "The Fruit of My Woman" takes the afterlife of animals as objects of food as entry into becoming plant.

Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive puts a stop to mortgaging our future through the body of the child in an acceptance of the death drive through the afterlives of Hitchcock’s films.

The summer school week will feature keynote lectures (to be announced) as well as short papers presented by PhD candidates and other young scholars and a series of seminars in which we will closely examine the texts mentioned above, along with other works, including Dan Chaisson’s book of poems, entitled The Afterlife of Objects and Michael Ann Holly’s The Melancholy Art.

We welcome papers dealing with these questions from art historical, cultural, literary, cinematic, material, affective, technological, machinic, linguistic and other perspectives.

Applicants do not need to present a paper. However, those wishing to present should send a proposal of no more than 300 words and a short bio (max. 150 words) to:

afterlifeoftheobject@gmail.com by 25 January 2019. You will be informed whether your contribution has been accepted by 8 February 2019. Papers will be circulated before the conference and will have to be submitted in full (max. 4,000 words) by 1 May 2019.

PhD students are credited 3,8 ECTS if certain requirements are met. For more information, please contact the organizers.

The ESSCS is an annual network-based event offering interdisciplinary research training in the fields of art and culture. The network comprises the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Copenhagen, University of Giessen, Goldsmiths College, Université de Paris VIII, the Lisbon Consortium, Ljubljana Institute for Humanities, University of Trondheim and Catholic University Rio de Janeiro.

Organizers: Frederik Tygstrup, Rune Gade and Carol Mavor.