Ageing brains and minds, ageing senses and sentiments (Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris)

AGEING BRAINS AND MINDS, AGEING SENSES AND SENTIMENTS: LITERATURE, NEUROLOGY, PSYCHIATRY

May 26-27, 2016

Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris

The Bergen Literature and Science Research group invites scholars of the humanities, neurologists and psychiatrists to explore the phenomenology of the ageing self. This research seminar encourages topics that intrinsically connect especially literary texts on ageing and old age with the realms of neurology and psychiatry. It will allow us to study comparatively some physical and psychological aspects of ageing, as they are perceived through the lenses of medicine, literature (imaginative, autobiographical, reflective) and also visual media, in any historical period. While we do not expect literary scholars to be medically trained or neurologists and psychiatrists to be experts in literary critique, we do hope to enable a lively dialogue. In this way the event will give various responses to some inherent challenges in an interdisciplinary approach to ageing. How can fictions, images and testimonies of the ageing mind cohere with neurology's materialized conceptions of neuro-degeneration? How do the weakened senses of senescence affect sensitivity, and how is this rendered in our divergent discourses? What conceptual frameworks and critical tools can the humanities adopt to study ageing in synergy with the scientific approaches pursued by medicine and psychiatry?

Confirmed speakers will include:

Martine Boyer-Weinmann (Université de Lyon 2), "Amnesia, hypermnesia and hyper-aesthesia narratives"

Bernt Engelsen (University of Bergen), "The ageing self in an epileptological and neuropsychiatric and setting"

Jan Frich (University of Oslo), "Literary Myths about neuro-degeneration: The case of Huntington's disease"

Samuel Lepastier (Université de Paris Diderot), "Ageing Hysterics: Fictional and Clinical cases"

George Rousseau (University of Oxford), "Ageing Brains, Jihadi Terrorists, and the black holes of Language"

The seminar language will be English.
Please send by February 1, 2016: a title and a short abstract (max. 200 words) including name, discipline and affiliation to Margery Vibe Skagen: margery.skagen@uib.no
Applicants will be notified of the committee's decision by February 15.

Venue:

Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme
190, Avenue de France,

75013 Paris

Link to Bergen Literature and Science Research Group: http://www.uib.no/en/rg/lit_sci

Contact:

Margery Vibe Skagen Department of Foreign Languages University of Bergen
Norway
margery.skagen@uib.no