ALLS FOR PAPERS: Imagining Death and the Afterlife in the Middle East, 50C0-1800 CE) (MESA 2014) Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 10:56

Subject:

Imagining Death and the Afterlife in the Middle East (c. 500-1800 CE) Middle
East Association (MESA) Annual Meeting 2014 Washington, DC, 22-25 November
2014

Organizers:
Patricia Blessing and Ali Yaycioglu

Abstracts are requested for a panel on Imagining Death and the Afterlife in
the Middle East (c. 500-1800 CE).
Please send a 300-400 word abstract and a CV to pblessin@stanford.edu by
January 15, 2014.

Authors of selected papers will be notified by January 25, 2014 and will
have until February 15, 2014 to upload their abstract on the Middle East
Studies Association's conference website. MESA membership is required to
submit an abstract to the MESA online system. The MESA program committee
will decide on the acceptance of the entire panel.

For more information on the conference, see:
http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/annual-meeting/index.html

Imagining Death and the Afterlife in the Middle East (c. 500-1800 CE)

This panel brings together papers that investigate representations of death
and the afterlife in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Central Asia. The
focus of papers may lie on any pre-modern context from late antiquity to the
early 19th century. Studies in history, religious studies, art history, and
anthropology are all equally welcome in a panel that aims to produce an
interdisciplinary dialogue around the theme of death and the afterlife,
beyond our modern understanding and practices of dying. Relevant topics
might include perceptions, conceptions, descriptions, and representations of
death and the afterlife in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim contexts; funerary
rituals and practices and displays of mourning; preservation of memory
through the construction of shrines for rulers, the rich, and saints; urban
space and cemeteries; pilgrimage and the use of relics; being unable to die
(e.g. vampires); inheritance and its recording; disease and executions; and
theological discussions of death and the afterlife.

Papers may work with any combination of textual or material sources, ranging
from elegies, funerary litanies, gravestones, foundation documents, and
hagiographies to architecture, paintings, and textiles.
At the theoretical level, work on death, burial, and relics in Islam (Leor
Halevi, Brannon Wheeler), on the body in late antique and medieval
Christianity (Peter Brown, Caroline Walker Bynum), and on shrines and
pilgrimage (Pedram Khosronejad, Joseph Meri) are relevant points of
comparison and methodological entry points.

Organizers:

Patricia Blessing, PhD
Stanford Humanities Center
Stanford University
pblessin@stanford.edu

Ali Yaycioglu, PhD
Assistant Professor of History
History Department
Stanford University
ayayciog@stanford.edu



 --

 --