Being Human: Individualism and the Self from the Renaissance to the 21st Century
Call for Papers
The conference is scheduled to take place at the University of Warwick on 22 February 2025, and the submission deadline for our CFP is 15 DECEMBER 2024. Watch this space and @BeingHuman2025Link opens in a new window for updates, and please get in touch with any questions!
Being Human - 22 February 2025
This one-day interdisciplinary conference will focus on the development, conceptualisation, and significance of individualism, human nature, and the self in the Western world, from the early modern era to the modern day. It aims to bring together a diverse range of scholars from history and literature through to philosophy and theology, putting disparate theoretical approaches in conversation with one another. In doing so, we hope to facilitate a nuanced consideration of the historicity and cultural variability of concepts such as selfhood in a modern-day West which often assumes their total universality.
Keynote speakers:
Roger Cooter (Honorary Professor of History at University College London)Link opens in a new window
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CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 15 DECEMBER! We are currently accepting abstracts of 300 words maximum (see full conference poster and CFP in righthand column). The conference is interdisciplinary in nature, and we encourage submissions from scholars working in diverse fields across the humanities; we are also open to submissions from other potentially relevant disciplines, such as neuroscience and psychology, as long as they fit within the geographic scope and timeframe of the conference (the Western world, broadly conceptualised, from roughly the sixteenth century to the modern day).
Submissions for 20-minute papers might consider, amongst other topics:
- Belief, human nature, and the self
- Self-control and the law
- Race, gender, and class in the formation of Western identities
- Capitalism, neoliberalism, and the rise of individualism
- Collectivism within individualistic societies
- The role of philosophy in shaping conceptions of the self
- The role of emotion in identity formation
- Historical perceptions of autonomy and self-determinism
Accepted speakers will be notified by December 2024
Booking will open in January 2025
Please email submissions, as well as any questions, to
Find us online @BeingHuman2025Link opens in a new window on Twitter/X
Get in touch
This conference is supported by the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick and is organised by History PhD Candidates Mia EdwardsLink opens in a new window (Mia.Edwards@warwick.ac.uk), Himesh MehtaLink opens in a new window (H.Mehta.1@warwick.ac.uk) and Anna PravdicaLink opens in a new window (Anna.Pravdica@warwick.ac.uk).
If you have any questions or want to get involved in some capacity, please get in touch using the contact details below.
Email:
