Dear all,
After this conference was postponed due to COVID in 2020, we are accepting new proposals for our conference on literary transcreation in Jain contexts.
We hope to welcome participants in person, but are also open to online participation.
Please forward this call to anyone who might be interested.
Call for papers
'Jain Practices of Literary Transcreation’
8th-9th September 2022
Ghent University, Belgium
The Department of Indian Languages and Cultures at Ghent University is happy to announce the organization of the Conference on 'Jain Practices of Literary Transcreation', held
at Ghent University, Belgium on the 8th and 9th of September 2022.
The conference organizers invite international scholars to present 20-minute papers on the theme of translation, transcreation or adaptation of literary
works by Jain authors. Papers may treat literature from a wide range of periods (from ancient to modern times), and in a variety of Indian languages (both classical and vernacular, and Southern as well as Northern Indian languages). The organizers especially
invite researchers who consider a diachronical and dialingual approach to the theme of the conference.
Conference Theme
The conference theme arises from the recognition that there is a vast corpus of Jain texts lying unexamined in manuscript libraries, many of which are
different versions of earlier works with an identical content. Therefore, in recent years Jainism scholars (e.g., Cort, Clines, Plau) have called for an end to the disregard of these later texts, appreciating them as literary works in their own right. This
conference wants to provide a coherent frame to study these undiscovered texts within their literary reality of transcreation as a Jain practice.
Though the prevalence of literary transcreation within historical Jain communities is striking, it is by no means a practice exclusive
to them. The broader field of South Asian Studies has in previous years increasingly dealt with the creative engagement of South Asian authors with an authoritative literary object (e.g., Ramanujan 1999). Although these studies have brought to the fore some
important conclusions, the Jains as a literary community have remained noticeably absent from these discussions. This conference wants to fill this gap, highlighting the influential role of Jain authors in the multilingual literary world of South Asia.
Scholars interested in presenting at this conference, may send a title and abstract (max. 300 words) to
Ev.Declercq@ugent.be and
heleen.dejonckheere@ugent.be, by the 8th
of August 2022.
With best wishes from the organizers,
Eva De Clercq
Heleen De Jonckheere
Simon Winant
Dr. Heleen De Jonckheere
Guest Professor
Dept. Languages and Cultures
Ghent University
Blandijnberg 2 - 9000 Ghent - Room 150.009
Heleen.DeJonckheere@Ugent.be ;
heleen.dejonckheere@utoronto.ca