Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds

Call For Papers: For the 2023 Annual Meeting, we invite paper proposals for the following three sessions: (1) Religious Experience and a Sense of Place. For this joint panel, organized in collaboration with Religious Experience in Antiquity, we welcome submissions that treat the overlap between a sense of place and religious experience. We particularly welcome papers that include lived religion, material religion or environmental studies approaches in their treatment of this topic. (2) Sensory Disabilities. Human cultures construct both the senses and (dis)abilities differently, depending on the values and meanings associated with the body. In her 2013 monograph, Sense and Stigma in the Gospels: Depictions of Sensory-Disabled Characters, Louise Lawrence initiated a set of dialogues with disability studies and sensory anthropology, attempting to refigure gospel characters with sensory disabilities and offer alternative interpretations of their conditions and social interactions. For this panel, co-sponsored with the Healthcare and Disability in the Biblical World unit, we welcome submissions engaging with Lawrence’s work, but also those considering sensory disabilities and /or the healing of such disabilities from other perspectives and in other ancient writings. (3) The Less Studied Senses. For this panel, we welcome papers that treat one of the less studied senses, such as taste, touch, smell, kinesthesia, proprioception, and pain. Papers that relate the sense in question to larger questions, such as social order, cosmology, cognition, or cultural values are especially welcome. For all panels, presenters are encouraged to explicitly state the data they are working on (text(s), artefact etc.) and what theoretical and/or methodological angle they are applying in their presentation.

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