Traveling in War Zones
Columbia University
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Graduate Student Conference
March 7 & 8, 2008
Call for Papers (January 6, 2008)
From Ground Zero to the Green Zone, war zones are rapidly losing what we might think of as their traditional forms. Since the birth of modern technological warfare, the museum diorama, with its grassy meadows and brightly colored columns of opposing troops, has ceased to bear any resemblance to the landscape of contemporary war. If we attempt a look from different perspectives, perhaps we will find that war and its territories have never been so simple to describe.
We are, therefore, soliciting papers that will respond to the conjunction of the phenomenon of travel with war zones. Who travels the war zone, by what means, and what kind of perspective on war emerges from this? (The perspective of the soldier as opposed to that of the civilian, the refugee, the journalist, the partisan, the mercenary, the tourist, etc.)
In the interests of interdisciplinarity , we are placing no restrictions on paper submissions — we welcome papers in fields from the history of technology to military history, literary studies, media studies, anthropology, and on.
Possible areas of interest might include, but are by no means limited to:
- How the experience of war manifests itself in the literary travelogue, and, conversely, how the experience of travel manifests itself in the war report.
- The development of transport technologies for the purpose of war, and their secondary repurposing for the purpose of travel (the horse, jeep, airplane, etc.).
- Descriptions of travel in crusade chronicles, documents of colonial conquests, war diaries, letters and postcards from the war front; how the experience of traveling war zones is captured in war sketches, photojournalism, private photo/video albums, etc.
- The wartime origins of psychological phenomena, such as nostalia and shock, and their historical transformations with respect to ongoing changes in the nature of displacement and rupture.
- Affinities and interferences between war and tourism.
- Traveling the Cold War (in reality and imagination) .
Deadline for submission of abstracts (300-400 words): January 6, 2008. Please submit abstracts to: germangradconferenc e@columbia. edu
[sursa balkans]
If you want to receive academic resources in your e-mail on daily basis, please subscribe to 10resources-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
