The 2013 ESA Conference
Jason Nielsen, Co-chair
Judd Staley, Co-chair

There are many opportunities to get involved with the conference:

• Interested in presenting or participating as part of a panel? Consult the Call for Papers here.
• Interested in helping to lead discussions, work behind-the scenes preparing for the conference or help during the conference? Volunteer here.
• Interested in attending the conference? Register here
• Interested in learning about who is presenting? Browse profiles of confirmed participants as they are updated here
• Interested in finding out more about the conference? Browse the conference website here.

Conference Call for Papers

The turn towards the influence of affect and emotions on “rational decision making”—the false separation between mind and body that neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls “Descartes’ Error”—has had wide appeal in recent years in the humanities and other fields. This conference intends to explore the theoretical frontiers of interdisciplinary scholarship that addresses the mind-body problem. How can we continue to think about mind-body relations, connections, or disruptions in new ways across disciplinary boundaries? How can recent work in the humanities on affect and emotions speak to other fields? What are the limitations of theories of affect? What might neuroscience offer to other disciplines for thinking about mind, consciousness, and embodiment? How can we consider the recent explosion of interest and attention—enthusiastic to bleak—on the possible effects that the Internet, technology, and increasingly digital lives are having on the connections or fractures between mind, body, and identity? How might we theorize mind and body in other ways—inter-personally, inter-subjectively, trans-personally, ethically—in material, social, and digital ways?

We invite interdisciplinary approaches to rethinking Cartesian dualism, including forms of dialogue between, but not limited to, neuroscience, affect theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, medicine, technology studies, cybernetics, and cognitive science. We encourage interrogation of disciplinary boundaries or interdisciplinary perspectives. Papers might be literary and humanities focused, or might also consider other perspectives on mind and body from the sciences, visual arts, philosophy, social sciences, and digital studies. We solicit, and would like to include, the widest possible range of approaches to ways of thinking about “minding the body” in all literary fields: pre-digital, pre-neuroscientic, pre-psychoanalytic, phenomenological, aesthetic, cognitive, historical, experimental, and in or about other media.