We are pleased to announce that the Being Human: Individualism and the Self from the Renaissance to the 21st Century Conference, sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick, will take place on 22 February, 2025.

Keynote addresses will be delivered by Roger Cooter (Honorary Professor of History at University College London) and Roger Smith (Reader Emeritus in the History of Science, Lancaster University).

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 in an attempt to put disparate theoretical approaches in conversation with one another. In doing so, we hope to facilitate a nuanced consideration of these concepts’ historicity and cultural variability in a modern-day West which often assumes their total universality.