CfP A Sense of the Absent: Perceiving Presence in Absence in Ancient Cultures
Call for Papers
A Sense of the Absent: Perceiving Presence in Absence in Ancient Cultures
Dresden/Germany, 18th – 19th of March 2027
Organized by the members of the DFG project ‘The Scent of the Text: The Representation of Smells in Ancient Greek Literature’ and the working group Sensorium
Helge Baumann Mario Baumann Douglas Cairns Isabelle Künzer Leon Schmieder Anna D. Uschner
While previous scholarship has taken the presence of sensory perception for granted and focused especially on intense or striking sensations, the phenomena of absence, partial presence or gradual manifestation of sensory experience have mostly remained unnoticed.
Accordingly, this conference will engage with the polarity of sensory presence and absence in the ancient world, not as a binary opposition but as a scalar phenomenon. Central points of enquiry will be the full, partial and non-presence of sensory impressions, affordances, and experience, as well as the specific forms, functions and discourses that manifest this spectrum. Of particular interest are phenomena such as:
- gaps and margins
- disruptions, incongruences, areas of transition
- representations of the absent
- modes of perception between currency, memory, expectation and imagination
Our aim is to create an interdisciplinary forum in classical and ancient world studies that brings together perspectives from diverse methodological and disciplinary backgrounds. The focus will be on historical phenomena of the ancient world, but contributions on Byzantine and medieval topics are also very welcome, as are contributions from other disciplines such as media studies, philosophy and cultural history, as long as they can demonstrate clear links to sensory perception and its gradation in an ancient world context.
Related theoretical frameworks include but are not limited to:
- concepts of φαντασία
- perspectives from reception theory
- epistemological and phenomenological approaches
- cognitive approaches, including 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enacted) cognition
- philosophy of mind
The following questions may be of interest:
- How do gradual forms of sensory presence manifest themselves in literary, medial or cultural practices?
- What role does absence, fragmentation or partial perception play in the sensory regimes of historical societies?
- How are non-presence or imaginary perceptions made productive epistemologically, aesthetically or institutionally?
- Which methodological approaches facilitate the recognition and description of transitional states of presence?
- How can ancient theories of perception be brought into dialogue with contemporary theoretical approaches?
We invite abstracts that engage with these or related questions and that develop a methodologically sophisticated perspective on the poles of presence and absence of sensory perception in the ancient world.
Please send your abstract as a Word and a pdf document, giving your name and the title of your paper in the form: name_title.doc/name_title.pdf. Abstracts of no more than 300 words in either English or German for a 30-minute presentation should be submitted by 31 May 2026 to . We welcome contributions from scholars of all career stages, including early career researchers, and plan to publish the proceedings of this conference.
This conference will be held in person. We shall provide free accommodation and a contribution towards travel expenses.