ORGANIZER:

Yaniv Fox, Bar-Ilan University

Abstract:

The conference 'Sanitized Pasts: Purity, Pollution, and Historical Narrative' sets out to examine the function of purity and pollution in the construction of historical narrative and memory. The conference presentations will consider attempts in Late Antique and Medieval texts to ‘purify’ the past by purging it of disagreeable components. Foundation myths often employ ideas of purity and pollution in their attempt to construct an idealized past. They imagine nucleic communities, whether religious, ethnic, civic, or otherwise, which contain some ‘pure essence’ later diluted by cultural encounter, religious schism, or simply corruption. The authority to define purity and pollution was itself founded on sanitized and edited versions of the past. The papers in this conference will explore this dynamic of shaping the present through creatively retrojecting notions of purity and pollution into the past.

Speakers:

Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, University of Haifa

Neta Bodner, Open University of Israel

Jennifer Davis, Catholic University of America

Wolfram Drews, University of Munster

Chris de Wet, University of South Africa

Éric Fournier, West Chester University

Rob Gleave, University of Exeter

Edmund Hayes, Radboud University

Gerda Heydemann, Freie Universität Berlin

Marie-Céline Isaïa, Université Lyon III

Sven Meeder, Radboud University

Rob Meens, Utrecht University

Daniella Talmon-Heller, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Debbie Tor, University of Notre Dame

Charles West, University of Sheffield

Robert Wišniewski, University of Warsaw

Angela Zielinski-Kinney, University of Vienna

 

The conference is supported by the Israel Science Foundation, grant no. 2883/22