Just came across ye olde Inbox via H-Net:
Call for Papers
Sensing Senses: Interdisciplinary Studies in Sensory Perception
Graduate Conference Hosted by the German & Scandinavian Studies Program, Languages, Literatures & Cultures Dept.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
February 17 – 19, 2012
Keynote Speaker: Florence Feiereisen (Middlebury College)
Roundtable Discussion: “Making Sense of Today’s Job Market”
At the mention of senses, one thinks of five capabilities used to gather data about one’s environment. This Aristotelian paradigm has dominated Western civilization long enough to establish itself as a truism among many scholars without, as anthropologist David Howe reminds us, “exploring how the senses interact with each other in different combinations and hierarchies.” Recent research in the social sciences and humanities has revealed an increasingly rhizomatic view of sensual worlds, in that the synaesthetic experience has become the norm: colors in film recall tastes, music conveys a sense of acceleration, the eye is fooled into feeling spaces, and so forth.
But to sense is also to act upon. Senses inculcate subjectivities, secure or rebel against social realities, and/or produce notoriously unreliable testimony at legal proceedings. They can be colonized and overloaded, blinded or corrupted, even opened, enticed and remotely enabled. But above all, they are to be historicized, located in the social context and bodies they inhabit or once inhabited.
The fifth biennial graduate student conference in German & Scandinavian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst invites interdisciplinary paper submissions on the broad topic of the “senses” with an emphasis on framing sites of perception as historically and culturally specific. To medieval scholars, one might ask how sensory experience inflected secular and spiritual worlds. To modern scholars, one could continue this line of thinking in terms of the embodied sensory apparatus of industrial producers and consumers.
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The Winds of War 