10/28/2014
CALL FOR PAPERS
Building Bad: The Construction of “Evil” in Religious Discourse
Austin, Texas
April 10-12, 2015
Graduate Conference at The University of Texas
Submission Deadline: 1/5/2015
Keynote Speakers
Jo Ann Hackett, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Religious Studies, The University of Texas at Austin.
Arlene M. Sánchez-Walsh, Associate Professor of Church History and Latino/a Church Studies, Azusa Pacific University.
Peter Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages, Harvard University.
All stories have their villains. To many storytellers throughout history, other peoples and cultures were irredeemably “evil,” “chaotic,” or “lawless.” Religious discourse has been consistently rife with these assertions about the enemy, often using the evil of the “bad guy” to demonstrate the characteristics of goodness. In this way, villains reveal as much about their denouncers as they do about the demons themselves.
Representations of evil have become a topic of interest in recent years as scholars come to understand the cultural polemics that underlie them. This conference seeks to explore the ways that different cultures have represented their antagonists—in “history,” “fiction,” or other discursive forms—and the dual function these representations serve to construct identities in conflict.
This conference is organized jointly by graduate students in Religious Studies and the Hebrew Bible/Ancient Near East program, and therefore papers navigating these two disciplines are especially encouraged. Topics of interest to consider include, but are not limited to: gender, apostasy, identity formation, boundary creation and maintenance, visual representation, space, material culture, the body, and narrative approaches.
Send submissions and inquiries to [email protected] by 1/5/2015.
Please include in your proposal the paper title, presenter’s name, email address, and institution. Please submit a 300-word proposal explaining the topic, main argument, and methodology of the project. Paper presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in delivery.
