6th Annual Braniff Conference in the Liberal Arts | The World is Bare Now: Nature and Human Flourishing
The Braniff Graduate Student Association of the University of Dallas is pleased to announce the 6th annual Braniff Conference in the Liberal Arts. This year the conference tackles the fundamental intersection of nature, the natural, and human flourishing. Our shared Western heritage is rich in understandings of the natural world: across epoch, discipline, and cultural boundaries, great minds have scrutinized the relationship between the natural world and our own thriving. Nature has been intermittently conceived as threatening and salvific, crude and refined, a principle of all activity and a limit to be transcended. The natural—and its concomitant concepts the unnatural and the supernatural—has served as an argumentative standard by which whole societies have articulated themselves in law, mores, and sentiments. As our contemporary discourse turns to militarize conceptions of the natural world, the Braniff Graduate Student Association calls on scholars to present new engagements with the myriad facets of nature and its relationship to human flourishing–whether that confirms some previous understanding of nature or interrogates the concept afresh. This year, the conference will begin with a poetry reading on Friday night, at which presenters and local poets will be invited to present some of their original work which engages with the conference theme.
The conference will take place at the University of Dallas, located in Irving, TX.
Call for Papers
We invite scholars working in the liberal and the fine arts to submit abstracts of no more than 500 words that consider nature and/or the natural from the perspective of their discipline, a particular author, or from an interdisciplinary approach. Preference will be given to those working in the liberal and fine arts disciplines including—but not limited to—philosophy, literature, politics, theology, history, psychology, painting, sculpting, print-making, and cinema, and drawing from the classical, medieval, modern, or contemporary period. The conference committee will invite select presenters to submit their essays or poetry to Ramify: The Journal of the Braniff Graduate School of the Liberal Arts.