Minding the Senses, Sensing the Mind

14th International Conference

Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus

20^th – 21^st of May 2015

"I would I knew his mind." - (Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1.2.33
"My own mind is my own church." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (I.i) 
“Where is my mind” – The Pixies

Keynote: Prof. Jonathan Sawday
(Saint Louis University, Missouri)

Invited Speaker: Dr Darragh Greene (University College Dublin)

Email: slumadridconference@gmail.com

CFP

Minding the Senses, Sensing the Mind

14th International Conference

Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus

20^th – 21^st of May 2015

"I would I knew his mind." - (Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1.2.33)

"My own mind is my own church." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (I.i)
"Where is my mind" - The Pixies

    The Department of English at Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus will host its Fourteenth Annual International Academic Conference on Friday, 20^th and Saturday, 21^st May. The keynote speaker is Jonathan Sawday, Saint Louis University, Missouri.

    The mind is not something that we find easy to imagine, and indeed cannot be imagined without itself. It is that intangible thing that relates originally to the memory, is often associated with the will, might house the soul, or it may itself be located in the brain. In medieval times we might have been reminded to keep God and the judgement in mind in all of our actions, in the early modern period we might have worried about how the passions of the mind overpowered our reason, in the age of reason we might have relied on our mind for all revelations and in more modern times we might ask, with The Pixies, "where is my mind". The mind is also the locus of human sensation. Though we experience the physical world through various parts of the body, the mind is what controls our analysis and synthesis of those sensations. Is the mind the sixth sense or is it simply the thing that takes the five senses and creates from them a world that we can understand? The mantra, ‘mind over matter’ suggests that it has power to shape the world itself, and writers and artists appeal to the minds of their readers, viewers and patrons to convey meaning and / or to generate ambiguity.

    You can set it to something, you can be put into it, go out of it, lose it, and keep something in it. It is in everything that we do, particularly as academics, as students, as teachers. But it is, nonetheless, a difficult thing to make sense of, easier sensed than understood, and intricately linked to the senses themselves. In the early modern period to refer to your wit would be roughly the same as to refer to your mind, and to refer to your five wits would be to refer to your five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell). The Enlightenment debates whether the mind is a cogito or a tabula rasa. For phenomenologists, it is profoundly shaped by the physical experience, for Freudians by instinct, for structuralists by language. The capacity of our minds and imaginations gives us the incredible ability to experience the unknown and known through art and literature, through letters and language on paper, through images on walls. Questions of the mind, how it works, and how powerful it can be will always be questions relevant to our past, present and future.

    This conference seeks to make sense of the mind and to put us in mind of the senses. As such the conference organisers would welcome papers on topics that might include, but are not limited to the following themes:

 - Making Sense, Sense and Sensitivity, Insight
 - The mind's relation to the five senses (touch, taste, smell, sound, sight - sixth sense?)
 - Disability (i.e. deafness, blindness, mental disability), Neurology, Mental Processes,
 - Mindfulness (or Mindlessness)
 - Being in / out of mind / out of your mind
 - Reason, Madness, Dreams, Sense and Nonsense
 - Mental 'actions': detachment, defamiliarisation, abstraction, theory/theorizing, contemplation
 - Inner worlds, Mental spaces, Creative processes
 - Body/Mind duality, Medical humanities

Papers should be no longer than 20 mins in length. If you would like to present a paper, please email a 300 word abstract and short biog before Sunday 6^th of March to Dr Andrew J. Power at slumadridconference@gmail.com. A small registration fee (€35 for students, €50 for lecturers and professors) will go towards administration and hospitality costs. To register please go to http://apply.madrid.slu.edu/activities/special8/step1/activity/183 and follow the instructions.