[Discussion] AKLIN NEREDE? DIYE SORANLARA

[Gonul]

BRAIN POWER: INTELLIGENCE/EMOTION/CULTURAL FANTASY

The 12th annual KSU CULTURAL STUDIES SYMPOSIUM, March 6-8, 2003

Keynote Speakers: Katherine Hayles and Nancy Kress (see below)

Where's your head at? Cultural critics, philosophers, and scientists
have
often sought to explain human intelligence and the emotions. Theorists
have
offered provisional definitions of such basic emotions as shame and
love;
scientists and philosophers have offered new theories to explain or
"map"
thought and feeling in the brain, often through evolutionary models.

In all of this work, the brain is either included in a wider cultural
imaginary or contrasted with it.

For the 12th Annual Cultural Studies Symposium at Kansas State
University,
we invite papers that consider how intelligence, reason, and/or emotion
have been located within a cultural imaginary. Specifically, how have
these
capacities been located in brains or some other material object (such as

the humours, or computers)? How have brains themselves become cultural
representations of these capacities, and more? Papers of any
disciplinary,
interdisciplinary, and historical periods are welcome, as well as
unconventional formats or methods.

Potential Topics

*       Historical transformations of affect
*       Artificial Intelligence
*       Pop culture brains
*       The linguistic turn vs. the new positivism
*       "Structures of Feeling"
*       Cognitive theories of the emotions
*       Sentiment and sympathy
*       Phrenology and galvanism
*       Rationalism vs. empiricism
*       Behavioralist approaches to psychology and the brain
*       Freudian and post-Freudian brains
*       Sociobiology, altruism and emotion
*       The Memento Mori and other mystical traditions
*       Medical philosophies of Galen and other pre-moderns
*       Philosophy of mind

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

KATHERINE HAYLES, professor of English at UCLA and a major figure in the

study of literature and science in the 20th and 21st centuries. Author
of
_How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and

Informatics_ (1999) and _The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and
Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century_ (1984).

NANCY KRESS, celebrated science-fiction writer and winner of two Nebula
awards and one Hugo award. Her science fiction work often explores the
implications of modern biological research in near-future settings.
Perhaps her most famous set of books, the "Beggars" trilogy, speculates
brilliantly on the future consequences of genetic "improvements" in
human
intelligence on world society.

See our conference website at
http://www.ksu.edu/english/symposium/index.html

Send 1-page abstracts to:

Michele Janette
Director, Cultural Studies Program
Kansas State University English Department
106 Denison Hall
Manhattan KS, 66506-0701.

Email submissions are encouraged: send to mjanette@ksu.edu.
Deadline: November 18, 2002.

Greg Eiselein
Kansas State University
<eiselei@ksu.edu>