03-05 Oct-2019, Ghent, Belgium
We are delighted to invite interested scholars and colleagues to participate in the opening event of the ERC-project ‘Everyday writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt. A socio-semiotic study of communicative variation’ (2018-2023).
The main aim of the conference is to explore to what extent it is possible and desirable to found a discipline such as historical social-semiotics, parallel to historical socio-linguistics. This novel, interdisciplinary approach is particularly relevant for ‘everyday’ documentary texts: since these texts represent autographs, their external characteristics can also be brought into interpretation. Some of the characteristics to be considered as expressions of social meaning (functioning as ‘semiotic resources’) are – but are not limited to – writing material, document format, and language choice.
The conference will mainly focus on documentary texts from the Mediterranean region, roughly spanning the period from the first millennium BCE to the first millennium CE.
Confirmed speakers include:
James Clackson (Cambridge)
Mark Depauw (Leuven)
Jean-Luc Fournet (Paris)
Antonella Ghignoli (Rome)
Tonio Sebastian Richter (Berlin)
Petra Sijpesteijn (Leiden)
Call for Papers:
Please submit a one-page English abstract to evwrit@ugent.be by April 30, 2019. Notification of acceptance will be given by June 1, 2019.
A full version of the CfP can be found here: http://www.evwrit.ugent.be/events/
