5^th German-American Frontiers of Humanities Symposium 2008

Design of Symposium

Subjects of Coercion: Evocations and Experiences of War

War and violence are ubiquitous in human history. War has an obvious transformative impact on those who directly participate, willingly or unwillingly, but it also has pervasive and sustained effects on all social, cultural, political, and economic realities. The humanities have always represented and refracted the human experience of war and in turn have shaped the waging of war itself. Recently, scholars in the humanities have begun to trace those less visible, but certainly no less important, effects of war. At the invitation of the American Philosophical Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, young scholars in Economic History, Musicology, Eastern European History, and South Asian Studies will be brought together to explore new ways in which the humanities might elucidate such complex phenomena. And so with this unusual mix of disciplines and fields we ask, what’s war got to do with it?

What is analytically useful about looking at war from a variety of disciplinary perspectives? Traditionally, economic historians have considered war primarily from a perspective of economic efficiency. Musicologists have usually avoided acknowledging the direct interplay between music and war. Historians of Eastern Europe have tended to privilege high politics as well as military and diplomatic factors. Scholars focusing on pre-modern South Asia have been hesitant to attend to the wider social and historical implications of textual representations of war. By promoting dialog across disciplines, we hope to gain analytical purchase on this wide ranging and powerful phenomenon.

Conference speakers and general participants are invited to engage with such questions as: how do individual and collective actors experience war? What ethical considerations inform their participation? How does the experience of war reflect and shape notions of gender? How is war remembered, represented, and enlisted in the service of larger historical agendae? By investigating the interaction of the arts with war, can we arrive at a better paradigm for explaining their persuasive powers? The case studies to be discussed here present new understandings of evocations and experiences of war.