[Discussion] Collecting the Unconscious: Reflections on Sleep and Dreams

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Collecting the Unconscious: Reflections on Sleep and Dreams

Graduate Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/ghf.htm

The Graduate Humanities Forum, a graduate student-run division of the
Penn Humanities Forum, is hosting its 5th Annual Conference on Thursday,
March 3rd and Friday, March 4th, 2005.

The Forum seeks conference proposals on this year's topic of "sleep and
dreams." We encourage a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the notion
of sleep. In this symposium, we welcome proposals that consider any
facet of sleep and/or dreams, and we offer the following suggestions as
inspiration:

    * Insomnia and somnambulism
    * Troubled Sleep: existentialism, bad faith, and the unconscious
    * Surrealism and its relation to sleep states
    * Magic realism and transitions of consciousness
    * Nightmares
    * Medieval dream visions
    * Nocturnes
    * "I have a dream": Dreams, race, and double-consciousness
    * Day dreams: the unconscious and the imaginary
    * The political unconscious
    * Psychoanalytic approaches to the unconscious (e.g. Kristeva)
    * Dreams and the subversive discursive
    * "Sleep aids": sleep, pharmacology, and altered states
    * Dreams and gender
    * The sleep of reason
    * Dream poetics
    * Sleep disorders
    * The politics of sleep
    * Lucid dreaming
    * Prophecy, divination, or the oracular dream
    * "Brain in a vat": from Descartes to _The Matrix_

We encourage presenters to consider these issues in light of their own
research or academic interests. In addition to formal papers, we
encourage proposals for panels, group discussions, short seminars, or
workshops. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be emailed by
*January 20, 2005* to the e-mail address provided below. A committee
from the Graduate Humanities Forum will evaluate all proposals, and
notification of acceptances will be emailed by February 7, 2005.

On Thursday evening, there will be a convocation and keynote address by
Christine Stansell, Princeton. There will be panels and other sessions
on Thursday and Friday. All area graduate students, regardless of year
of study and field, are invited to participate.

About our keynote:

Christine Stansell is professor of history at Princeton University,
where she teaches American women's history as well as courses in the
Program in the Study of Women and Gender. She has long written about
women's history, feminism, sexuality, and cities. Her books are City of
Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986), the anthology Powers
of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (1984), and American Moderns:
Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000). Her review
essays about American history and literature appear regularly in The New
Republic.

	Kristina Morris Baumli
Email: kmbaumli@dept.english.upenn.edu
<mailto:kmbaumli@dept.english.upenn.edu>
Visit the website at http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/