‘A Breeze in God’: The Spirituality of Music and Song.
Host and dates: Parthenope University, Naples). 11-12 September 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2026.
Event organised by: Raffaella Antinucci (Parthenope University, Naples) and Adrian Grafe (Université d’Artois)
Venue details: Parthenope University, Naples, Italy
Event presentation
Why is spirituality so closely linked to music and song? Composer Philip Glass has said of the chant of Buddhist monks that it is ‘a tradition where the musical and spiritual inheritances of the community are really identical’ (Schaefer 14). One might go even further and say, with the Rilke of the Sonnets to Orpheus, that ‘Singing is Being’. With contemporary advances in the neurosciences, the growing scientific and medical interest in music therapy, and the acknowledgement of the role of music and song in many spiritualities and faith expressions, as well as ways in which religious allusions and references can be harnessed to otherwise secular forms of art, it would seem timely to interrogate such phenomena from various scientific and humanistic perspectives and theoretical standpoints. Can non-spiritual music and song be considered as granting access to spirituality, as a valid form of knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door, and what kind of ‘heaven’ would that be?
The organisers would love to welcome researchers, musicians, and people who are both researchers and musicians. Contributions may take the form of traditional academic papers, musical performances, creative criticism, or blendings of these approaches. With no pretence to exhaustiveness, and along with the above remarks, presentations might focus on:
- The phenomenology of spiritual experience linked either to composing music, listening to music, alone or as audience member, or to the playing of music (for example, musicians’ accounts of spiritual experiences they may have had while performing)
- Questions of intention and reception: if the intention behind a work is spiritual, how far is it received as such – how far should it be received as such – by an auditor or an audience?
- Monastic singing, including Buddhist and Christian, as an intrinsic part of spiritual life
- Sacred choral music in different ecclesial traditions and communities
- Spirituals – the religious songs of black people in America, but also white spirituals; and musical compositions based on spirituals such as those of R. Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943)
- The nature of religious poetry inspired by music and musicians, a prime example being G. M. Hopkins’s ‘Henry Purcell’
- Musical settings of sacred texts and religious poetry
- The phenomenon of American Christian rock music (Lauren Daigle, Matt Maher, Rich Mullins), and the question of cross-over into mainstream genres and reception
- Music associated, rightly or wrongly, with so-called ‘New Age’ spirituality (cf Einaudi’s ‘Divenire’)
- Music and song as an experience of time, timeless and eternity, or of ‘infinite space’
- Music, song, faith and doubt, religious or otherwise
- Possible anti-spirituality in certain pieces or types of music (e.g. some kinds of heavy metal)
- Spiritual interpretations of non-spiritual works
- The role of silence in music and spirituality (e.g. John Cage’s 4’ 33’’)
- Music as ritual or liturgical action (not merely as accompaniment to worship but as a spiritual act in itself)
- Spirituality and digital music
- Spiritual longing in secular music
- The spiritual dimensions of improvisation, especially in jazz, gospel, or spontaneous worship music
- etc.
Submissions
Please send 150-word proposals for 20-minute presentations in English, accompanied by a brief biobiblio, to
- Raffaella Antinucci
raffaella.antinucci@uniparthenope.it and - Adrian Grafe adrian.grafe@univ-artois.fr
by April 30th 2026.
Notification of acceptance by May 10th 2026.
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
CFP Spirituality Music and Song Parthenope 10-11 SEPTEMBER 2026(Posted 5 February 2026)
Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis.
Host and dates: Pembroke College, Cambridge. 17-18 September 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 16 January 2026.
Event presentation
Gendered work on medieval popular politics has ended to revolve around the exceptional. This workshop explores how studies of gender can reconfigure discourses of medieval political community. We ask how attending to gendered bodies and identities might help us better understand the fissures in political culture in medieval Europe. Marking, for example, women’s participation as either absent or rare confines their involvement to the historical margins. How did literary as well as non- literary texts from various genres, ranging from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, engage with gendered political action? How did ideas of gender stabilise or destabilise political performances?
We invite abstracts for 25-minute papers, as well as expressions of interest for participation. We welcome papers with a historical, literary, or interdisciplinary focus. Potential topics could include but are not limited to:
- Frameworks for understanding non-normative gender expressions in political spaces.
- Studies of politics at the intersection of gendered, queer, or trans methodologies.
- Histories of masculinities in the political community.
- Emotion and/or Affect
- Weaponized/defensive gender
- Manoeuvring bodies through political crisis
- Inclusion and exclusion
- Different sites of political discourse, such as domestic and non-violent conflict.
- Collectively, the papers will interrogate the role of gender in political discourse.
Contact details
- Abbie Fray abigail.fray@unibe.ch
- Alice Raw ar889@cam.ac.uk
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
(Posted 18 December 2025)
Stories and Histories of Power.
Host and dates: ERIBIA, Université de Caen Normandie. 24-25 September 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 15 May 2026.
Event presentation
Confirmed Keynote speaker : Peter Boxall
Based on the premise that any account is the result of a re-ordered selection in facts which is the mark of the power of the author and/or the institution or cultural group they stand for., this conference will examine factual and fictional narratives of power in the English-speaking world.
Biographies, biofictions and biopics tell a rise or an attitude to power (a higher position of control and exertion of power politically of culturally) and historical fiction feeds and orientates the memory of power. The theme of power is rooted in authority, but also in everyday life. In many novels and short stories, it lends itself to specific representations, such as political figures, religious leaders or heads of families. These authority figures are often allegories on the paradigmatic axis. All representations of power in literature can be discussed here. We will also consider the shift in authors and subjects of stories and histories of power, focusing both on the process and the result of marginalisation and invisibilisation of non-dominant groups/minorities. How is this shift operated in fiction and how is the reader/viewer led to sympathise with it?
In a historical or cultural studies perspective, we are invited to interrogate the ways power is constructed, legitimized, or contested. Power tries to engage historians in producing such discourses as will bolster authority. Dominant powers seek to marginalize and exclude dissident voices, though counter-narratives will emerge to challenge established social and political orders. Through narrative practices such as public speeches and their scenography, biographies and autobiographies, power constructs and projects itself. Political actors will use language in the broad sense to bring closer to the people the abstract institutions that rule their lives within given social structures, whether they seek to strengthen or overthrow such institutions. Polities rest upon foundational myths transmitted, revisited or reappropriated through public festivals, media narratives and cultural accounts. Studying these various aspects will be an investigation of how authority is (re)configured, (re)modelled or resisted.
Besides individual proposals as usual, we also welcome dual proposals, with 2 related talks: the same topic considered in two different geographic areas, or in two different approaches (fiction/history, history/visual arts…), a foundational myth at two distinct times, two consecutive events… Once you have agreed with a colleague, send us your individual abstracts and bio notes in a single document under a joint title. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Contact details
- Bertrand Cardin (bertrand.cardin@unicaen.fr)
- Anne-Catherine de Bouvier (anne-catherine.debouvier@unicaen.fr)
- Taoufik Djebali (taoufik.djebali@unicaen.fr)
- Armelle Parey (armelle.parey@unicaen.fr)
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
(Posted 16 February 2026)