Mormon Scholars in the Humanities (MSH) invites proposals for its 2023 annual conference. The conference topic this year is Translation/s, and papers or panels organized around the theme are encouraged.
Most religious traditions rest on some kind of often understated relationship to translation. What can be gleaned from reflection on the Mormon case? How does translation serve the Mormon humanistic tradition, broadly read? What is translation, and what are its stakes? Who translates, and who wins and loses in those relationships? What is a translator, a source, and a target text? How does translation relate to language, creation, obfuscation, interruption, and revelation—and what does it mean to be translated, anyway?
Under what conditions is a translator a prophet or, as the Italian phrase traduttore, traditore puts it, a traitor? How are translation exercises—taken up across art, literature, philosophy, history, anthropology, the soft social sciences, and other interpretive fields buoyed by both the bureaucratic accoutrement of compendia and appendices, records and writ—tied into revelation, interpretation, hermeneutics, and meaning? What is behind the “&” in writ & vision except a kind of translation? What role do embodied witnesses, secondhand observers, developments in historiography and ahistoricity, the evolving matrices of gender, race, class, the people behind machine translation, and other conditions of being play in a world in uneven translation?
Possible themes include: Translation, translated, transformation, translator/seer/revelator, embodied witnesses, second-hand genders, machine translation and reading, ahistoricity, JST, Book of Abraham, appendices/compendia/written word, as far as it is..., linguistics, language, literature, stylistics & style, discourse analysis, temporality & spatiality, etc.
As always, we also invite high-quality paper proposals on other topics, including those that reflect one’s current professional research interests or pedagogy in the humanities. Interested scholars (affiliated or independent) and graduate students are invited to submit 250–350 word abstracts for papers, as well as proposals for organized panels. Proposals received by October 31 will be fully considered. Notifications will be sent out no later than November 30.
All presenters are required to register for the conference but are not required to be members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Graduate students wishing to be considered for a Graduate Student Travel Grant can indicate that when making their submission. Information about the registration fee and available accommodation will be posted soon at mormonscholars.net.
Please direct any questions to President Jonathon Penny president@mormonscholars.net.
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