CFPs: Wisdom and Virgins

Laura Vivanco

A Wise Virgin

Love of Wisdom Vs. Wisdom of Love

3rd Comparative Literature Graduate Conference SUNY-BUFFALO, 2013

Insofar as philosophia concerns the “love of wisdom,” the possibilities and limits of wisdom and love call into question the possibility of philosophy. As love and wisdom are consciously and unconsciously unified in the philosophers’ pursuits of wisdom, could the wisdom of love have been supplemented, mixed or misled by the love of wisdom? Does it make philosophy as the result of philosophia problematic?

Fundamentally, this questions how philosophical wisdom negotiates the principles of rationality, sexuality, personality, relationality, pleasure, life stage, and the personal life process as a whole or temporality. Especially, feminist concerns, for example, women as agents instead of sexually desired love objects, have remodeled the above principles and problematized the philosophical relationship with truth built upon individuals and even philosophy’s claim to truth as a genre. Thus, this conference will reexamine how different loves, for example, agápe, éros, philía, and storgē are combined, supplemented, and, in some cases, oppressed, ignored, unarticulated, and even rejected. Furthermore, we’d like to ask how the relationship between love and wisdom is interpreted, (de)constructed, or played differently in western and non-western cultural traditions, for example, yin-yang as a sexualized characteristic of ancient Chinese wisdom.

Could wisdom become the object of love? Could we really pursue the understanding of love? Do wisdom and love share the same myth? Or, do they have to supplement each other? Then, how does truth go with them? By thinking about the relationship between the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love, our conference is hoping to explore a way to revive the relationship between philosophy and life in our contemporary context. 

More details here.
Submission deadline: 1 February 2013.

Virgin Envy: Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Virginity

Eds. Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr

Contemporary culture has seen a renewed interest in virgins, from Bella Swan and Edward Cullen to Anastasia Steele to Steve Carrell’s infamous 40-old-virgin to the rise of Purity Clubs. How do we understand these discussions and representations of virginity? Do these texts “re-invent” virginity? Or, do these texts merely repeat “standard” treatments of virginity?

This edited volume aims to work through the poetics and politics of virginity in narrative, poetry, cinema, and popular culture. This volume treats virginity as an area of theoretical, intellectual, and cultural concern in modern texts. The goal is to position virginity as an interdisciplinary matter that must be studied from the widest possible range of perspectives. The editors believe that any study of virginity demands and interdisciplinary and/or intercultural perspective precisely because it is inculcated by so many discourses: religious, cultural, psychological, sociological, anthropology, ethnographic, philosophical, etc. The volume will ideally include essays from the humanities and social sciences, but the editors would welcome papers from outside of the humanities and social sciences.

We welcome papers that recognize the complexity and diversity of virginity. We are especially interested in papers that move beyond normative definitions and understandings of virginity:

·      Purity Clubs, Abstinence, and the Silver Ring Thing

·      Celebrity Culture and Virginity

·      Queer Virginities (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, etc.)

·      Male virginities

·      Defining virginity lost (and found)

·      Hymenoplasty, re-virginization, vaginal rejuvenization, medical interventions

·      Cross-cultural analyses of virginity

·      Psychoanalytic, Psychological, Sociological, Philosophical Approaches and the study of Virginity

·      Virginity in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

·      Virginity and Identity, Identifying as Virgin, Epistemology of the Virgin’s Closet

·      The commodification of virginity, virginity auctions, virginity pornography

·      Virginity and confession, religious contexts, psychotherapeutic contexts

·      Virginity and Romance


Please send abstracts (500 words, including proposed bibliography) and a brief CV  (1-2 pages) by March 1, 2013 to csantos@brocku.ca, allanj@brandonu.ca, spahra@macewan.ca.

Completed article-length papers (5,000 words, MLA Style) will be due by August 1, 2013. All papers will undergo a peer-review process before final acceptance and publication. 


The image depicts the Fifth Wise Virgin, by Martin Schongauer (c. 1430-1491). I found it at the Web Gallery of Art where it is stated that "Images and documents downloaded from this database can only be used for educational and personal purposes." This is an educational, non-profit purpose.