The Ph.D. Program in History

at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

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February 15 CFP Graduate Student Conference of the Rutgers Dept of German and Eastern European Studies: “Economic Hi$tories”

The Spring 2015 Graduate Student Conference of the Rutgers Department of German and Eastern European Studies on April 24th and 25th welcomes discussion on topics in the humanities and the field of economics that unveil new critical and interdisciplinary approaches to questions of common interest. Professor Fritz Breithaupt, chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, will be the keynote speaker; Dr. Henry Sussman, Professor of German at Yale University, will deliver a guest lecture.
Groundbreaking work by provocative economists of recent decades including Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff, Robert Skidelsky continues to stress the importance of historical analysis. Amidst the catastrophic effects engendered by the 2008 financial crisis on the global economy, we similarly wish to reconsider the value of conventional approaches to market behavior and economic forecasting.
Such a shift from quantitative to more qualitative modes of thinking about economics indeed represents both a call and a challenge to the humanities. Money has historically preoccupied artists and scholars in the humanities, from bourgeois dramas of the Enlightenment to the elusiveness of money in the romantic cultural imaginary, to the hustle and bustle of the Weimar film industry, to most recently a panel on “money” at the 2010 German Studies Association conference. Nevertheless, economic praxis and work being done in the humanities today remains divisive.
The following include, but are not limited to, topics we welcome participants to discuss:

  • Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Taste
  • Debt and Morality in the Philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger
  • Homo Economicus, or How the Self Became Tied Up with Money around 1800
  • John Locke’s Theory of Ownership and its Consequences for Modernity
  • Marxism Today
  • Exchange Value and Psychoanalysis
  • Money and Bourgeois Dramas of the Enlightenment
  • Naturalism and Economics in the Romantic Imaginary
  • Technologies and Economics of Literary Distribution from 1450 to the Present
  • The Weimar Film Industry and Allegories of the German Collective Unconscious

Papers that discuss the following texts are especially encouraged:

  • Fritz Breithaupt’s Der Ich-Effekt des Geldes: Zur Geschichte einer Legitimationsfigur (2008)
  • Daniel Fulda’s Schau-Spiele des Geldes (2012)
  • Richard Gray’s Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination (2008)
  • Joseph Vogl’s Kalkül und Leidenschaft (2004)

Please e-mail your 250-word abstract before February 15th for a 20 to 30 minute presentation to both
conference organizers Stefanie Populorum and Carlos Gasperi at stefanie.populorum@rutgers.edu and
carlos.gasperi@rutgers.edu directly. Please also include in your subject heading: “2015 Rutgers
Economic Histories.”