Dear friends and colleagues,

in case you are considering to visit Rome at the end of this Summer, here is an additional reason for doing it. Please consider the following also as an invitation to join a collaborative enterprise which might be more intriguing and stimulating (and will surely be more fun) than usual conferences:

A Coffee Break Conference on Comparison and Comparative Method
Rome, Institute of Oriental Studies, University "Sapienza", 17--19 September 2015

About the CBCs in general
The Coffee Break Conference (CBC) project is the result of a larger reflection on the common sensical statement that "the most interesting  parts of a conference are the coffee breaks". One yawns or falls asleep while most papers are read — apart from a couple of them and one's own one. By contrast, one often takes part of challenging and fascinating debates while sipping at a cup of tea or coffee. Often, the same papers sound thought-provoking and insightful during the breaks, and extremely boring while they are actually read. Therefore, what a "coffee break conference" aims at is to leave behind the rigidity and formality of the official academic and scholarly meetings and to favour an open-minded exchange of ideas, suggestions, discussions and criticisms, within the spirit of a friendly dialogue held in an informal atmosphere.

About this conference in particular
Panels:

1) Linguistic Selves: Language and Identity in the Premodern World (contact person: Andrew Ollett, andrew.ollett@gmail.com)

2) From cross-cultural comparison to shared epistemic spaces: educating desire in the “medieval” epistemic space (contact person: Marco Lauri, marco.f.lauri@gmail.com)

3) The “Religion” Challenge: Comparative Religious Studies and the Trouble to Transfer Conceptional Terms from Europe to Asia (contact persons: Ann-Kathrin Wolff, ann-kathrin.wolf@rub.de; Madlen Krüger, madlen.krueger@rub.de)

4) Is Theology comparable? Comparison applied to “Theology” and “God” (contact person: Elisa Freschi, elisa.freschi@gmail.com)

5) Knowing the unknown: Extra-ordinary cognitions in Brahmanical philosophies (contact person: Marco Ferrante, marco.ferrante@oeaw.ac.at)

6) The trans-cultural reshaping of psychoanalysis, or the perks of comparative psychodynamics (contact person: Daniele Cuneo, danielecuneo@hotmail.it)



You can find the calls for papers and every other information here: https://asiaticacoffeebreak.wordpress.com/2015-2/


Looking forward to see or meet you in Rome,

elisa freschi


--
Dr. Elisa Freschi

Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia
Austrian Academy of Sciences
Apostelgasse 23
1030 Vienna
Austria
Phone +43 1 51581 6433
Fax +43 1 51581 6410
http://elisafreschi.com
http://oeaw.academia.edu/elisafreschi