ASE Conference on Esotericism June 3-5, 2004

The ASE is currently planning a conference on Western esotericism to take place at Michigan State University’s Kellogg Center on June 3-5, 2004. This is a first-rate hotel and conference facility. The theme of the conference will be esotericism in North America, but we anticipate papers on a wide variety of subjects ranging in time from antiquity to the present. All major speakers will present at plenary sessions of the conference, and there will also be plenary presentations and discussion panels throughout the conference as a whole. All paper proposals will be vetted by a pre-conference panel. We will include ten to fifteen minutes for discussion after the presentation of three papers, which will be limited to twenty minutes apiece. In this way, we will encourage genuinely interdisciplinary discussion and exchanges of views, something that does not happen during many disciplinary academic conferences.
There are already humanities scholars working in the field of esotericism from a wide variety of perspectives, but they have no venue in which to meet and to develop their mutual understanding of a complex range of religious, historical, literary, and artistic phenomena. Major literary, philosophical, and religious figures and movements of the past few centuries were indebted to various currents of esotericism. What was the extent of this indebtedness? Where was or is it most prevalent? The conference will provide a venue for analyzing questions like these, and for encouraging new scholarship that cuts across a range of disciplines as well as new scholarship that resides entirely in particular disciplines but would be of particular interest to other scholars of esotericism. This will be a truly interdisciplinary conference that will make the study of esotericism in North American available to a broad range of interested scholars

We are now accepting paper proposals, and plan to begin the registration process on 1 October, 2003. There are only a limited number of reduced rate hotel rooms booked, so it's in your interest to register early.