Tufts University will be hosting its first annual Graduate Humanities Conference on “Curiosities.” The conference will take place on Friday, February 17th, 2012 from 8:30am to 5:30pm, with a reception to follow. This new conference expands the long-standing Tufts English Graduate Organization (TEGO) conference to include interdisciplinary approaches and insights and is open to graduate students studying in programs in the humanities at institutions worldwide.
1st Annual Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference
What makes an object, a person, or a pursuit a “curiosity”? Are curiosities abnormal and rare? Are they always the extraordinarily strange, or can they be an everyday oddity? Enmeshed in a larger set of notions that often pit the social against the individual, the normative against the taboo, and the expected against the surprising, curiosities generate questions about desire, taste, knowledge, and inquiry.
This interdisciplinary conference – which replaces a longstanding English graduate conference at Tufts University – endeavors to explore past, present, and future “curiosities” in the many senses of the word. We will consider novel objects and people, as well as irregular approaches and perspectives. How might being “curious” be both an impetus to activity and a description of activity itself? How is a desire for knowledge a potential curiosity in its own right?
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