Event

Keywords Symposium

In conjunction with the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2024–2025 Forum on Keywords, this symposium engages mobile concepts and their genealogies, histories, structures of meaning, translations, and adaptations across time and space. In three panels curated around the Raymond Williams keywords of “Aesthetics,” “Imperialism,” and “Humanity,” we focus on themes that drive cultural and social concepts and inspire global interlocution across languages, perspectives, and temporalities.

As we gear up to celebrate the anniversary of Williams’ foundational book "Keywords," we will reflect on how generative the use of keywords remains while also adding to and challenging the original vocabulary. We hope to make Williams’ process applicable for the twenty-first century and fruitful for the questions scholarship is grappling with today.

Join us as scholars from the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts expand upon—and challenge—some of Williams’ categories.

Symposium organized by the Wolf Humanities Center's 2024–2025 Research Associate Angelina Eimannsberger; Doctoral Fellows Jacob Myers, Paige Pendarvis, Jennifer Reiss, and Jeremy Steinberg; and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows Maryam Athari, Usmon Boron, Lama Elsharif, Charlotte Kiechel, and Paniz Musawi Natanzi.

Cosponsored by Penn's Departments of Anthropology, Classical Studies, English, History, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Music, Religious Studies, Russian and East European Studies, and South Asia Studies; Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory; Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, Jewish Studies Program; Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy; Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts; Middle East Center; South Asia Center; and Theorizing Colloquium Series.

To register for this event, click here. 

This event is Co-Sponsored by the Middle East Center. 

Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Van Pelt Library

3420 Walnut St 6th Floor Philadelphia, PA 19104

Friday, February 21 · 10am - 7:30pm EST