Call for Papers: A Sense of the Absent: Perceiving Presence in Absence in Ancient Cultures
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15. April 2026
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Call for papers
A Sense of the Absent: Perceiving Presence in Absence in Ancient Cultures
Dresden/Germany, 18th – 19th of March 2027
Submission Deadline: 31 May 2026
This conference will engage with the polarity of sensory presence and absence in the ancient world, not as a binary opposition but as a scalar phenomenon. Central points of enquiry will be the full, partial and non-presence of sensory impressions, affordances, and experience, as well as the specific forms, functions and discourses that manifest this spectrum.
Our aim is to create an interdisciplinary forum in classical and ancient world studies that brings together perspectives from diverse methodological and disciplinary backgrounds. The focus will be on historical phenomena of the ancient world, but contributions on Byzantine and medieval topics are also very welcome, as are contributions from other disciplines such as media studies, philosophy and cultural history, as long as they can demonstrate clear links to sensory perception and its gradation in an ancient world context.
We invite abstracts that engage with these or related questions and that develop a methodologically sophisticated perspective on the poles of presence and absence of sensory perception in the ancient world.
Please send your abstract as a Word and a pdf document, giving your name and the title of your paper in the form: name_title.doc/name_title.pdf. Abstracts of no more than 300 words in either English or German for a 30-minute presentation should be submitted by 31 May 2026 to anna_dorothea.uschner@tu-dresden.de. We welcome contributions from scholars of all career stages, including early career researchers, and plan to publish the proceedings of this conference.
This conference will be held in person. We shall provide free accommodation and a contribution towards travel expenses.
Organization
Organized by the members of the DFG project ‘The Scent of the Text: The Representation of Smells in Ancient Greek Literature’ and the working group Sensorium
Contact
anna_dorothea.uschner@tu-dresden.de
The complete Call for Papers can be found at the conference website.
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