RELICS

Researchers of European Literary Identity, Cosmopolitanism and the Schools

Events

Festive Journal Launch with Lecture by Catherine Conybeare (Bryn Mawr College)

All those interested are welcome to join us at the festive launch of RELICS’s open access journal JOLCEL, which will take place on September 20, 2019 from 4 to 7.30 pm in the Atrium of the Ghent University faculty library of Arts and Philosophy (Rozier 44, Ghent, Belgium). To mark this event, Catherine Conybeare (Bryn Mawr College) will be giving an inaugural lecture entitled ‘”Improve This Thought”: Latin Literature and Cosmopolitan Marginalia’. Her lecture will be followed by a reception with music and testimonials by Ghent University colleagues about the importance of the Latin tradition in their past and current research and educational activities.

September 20, 2019, Ghent University

Mapping Latin Cosmopolitanism

The autumn meeting of the research group RELICS follows up on the spring workshop ‘Mapping Cosmopolitanism’, in which we explored how the concept of cosmopolitanism been interpreted before. Focussing on Latin now, and with the concept of cosmopolitanism, we try to gain a better understanding of how Latin literature has functioned throughout the ages as an important presence in the landscape of European literature.

4 December 2018, Ghent University

The Medieval Literary Canon in the Digital Age

An often repeated promise of the digital humanities, in the wake of the “computational turn”, is that the wide availability and accessibility of historical texts enables scholars to breach the restrictions of a literary canon. Such a potential for literary computing, which was in 1992 first set forward as a “new” philology by its godfather Roberto Busa SJ, prominently returns in the works of computing literary theorists such as John Burrows, Jerome McGann and Franco Moretti. Their assertions that quantification entails a “widening of the canon” and eventually the advance of a “new philology”, easily invoke medievalists’ inquisitiveness. How, exactly, can the digital humanities provide such insights for the Middle Ages?

17-18 September 2018, Ghent University

Winckelmann’s Victims

This conference aims to consider classical normativity with its including prejudices and exclusions as a case- study for cultural self-fashioning by way of European literature. It seeks to explore how the normative status ascribed to the classics and the ensuing prejudices have, from the Early Middle Ages to modern times, influenced and shaped thoughts and views of the literary identity of Western Europe.

20-22 September 2018, Ghent University

Mapping Cosmopolitanism

The spring meeting of the new research group RELICS is devoted to the concept of cosmopolitanism: how has the concept been interpreted before and how can we shift its course in order to make it more valuable for the study of historical literatures and European identity? We want to map out the travels of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in academic discourse to see how it might transform our view of the history of European literatures.

17 May 2018, Ghent University

Telling Tales Out of School: Latin Education and European Literary Production

The conference “Telling Tales Out of School. Latin Education and European Literary Production”, was the opening event of our research group. We gathered Latin scholars who share an interest for literature across time periods and national boundaries, and who, together, can cover education as an undercurrent for literary production during the entire Latinitas.

14 – 16 September 2017, Ghent University