EAJS Virtual 2024: Jewish Literatures, Places, and Heritage
Date for Virtual Conference: 21 November 2024
Audience Registration Deadline: 14 November 2024
Link for Online Registration: Online Registration Form
Link for Detailed Programme: EAJS Virtual Programme
In summary, there will be 2 keynote speakers and 12 panel sessions with 3 or 4 speakers in each:
Keynotes:
- Ruth Ellen Gruber: Engaging the Real-Imaginary: Shtetl Dreams and Shtetl Days
- Massimo Giuliani: Jerusalem and the hundreds ‘small Jerusalems’ of the Diaspora
Panels Sessions:
- Heritage:
- Unexpected Forms of Heritage
- Belarusian Jewry: Spatial and Historical Measures
- Jewish Heritage in Wales: Future Directions
- Geographies:
- Forgotten Landscapes, New Places, and Identity
- Spacial Imagination in Second Temple Apocalypticism
- Places and Texts in Chabad: Past and Present
- Literature and Literary Places:
- Building around the Void in Contemporary Hebrew and Jewish Literature
- Nostalgic and Utopic Places in European Jewish Literature
- Reconceptualising the Places, Spaces, and Historical Entanglements of Jewish American Literature
- New Readings and Rediscovery of Urban Topographies:
- The Afterlife of the Shtetl
- Intersecting Spaces, Places, and Literature
- In Search of Jewish Urban Topographies
Jewish literature, heritage sites, and cultural landmarks form intricate topographical networks across urban and rural landscapes. Since the mid-1990s, the promotion of Jewish heritage—synagogues, museums, ghetto areas, and Shoah memorials—has significantly shaped the economic and cultural landscapes of European cities. Alongside these developments, there has been a growing interest in sites linked to Jewish literary creativity, fostering new forms of cultural pilgrimage. Places associated with Jewish authors and the settings in their works have become focal points in travel experiences, highlighting the rich interplay between literature and physical space.
This virtual conference will explore multiple dimensions of Jewish Literatures, Places, and Heritage, from macro-level analyses of trans-regional Jewish networks to micro-level studies of specific locations such as Jewish residential areas. Jewish topographies, tourism phenomena, and policies will also be examined to understand their role in shaping Jewish literary memory and heritage. The conference aims to open dialogue on both symbolic and physical spaces—religious, historical, and literary—and how these have been represented, studied, and conveyed through time, as well as their current and future developments.
The event will feature a keynote by Ruth Ellen Gruber and will bring together a range of perspectives on religious and secular spaces, exploring synchronous and diachronic approaches. Panels will delve into unexpected forms of heritage, historical entanglements of spaces and places in Jewish American Literature, and into the nostalgic and utopic places in European Jewish Literature. By drawing on literary, cultural, and historical insights, this conference provides a platform for scholars to collaborate, develop innovative research, and generate new approaches to understanding the interconnections between Jewish literature, places, and heritage.
To register to attend this event (as non-speaker audience), please use the following online form: Online Registration Form
EAJS members who would like to attend as part of the audience (i.e., as non-speakers) have until 14 November (23:59 UK time) to register using the Online Registration Form (attendance is free for members).