Call for Applications Princeton Munich Summer Graduate Seminar
Honoré Daumier, 1846
„Ce que le bourgeois est convenu de nommer une petite distraction“
“What the bourgeois would call a little distraction”.
“Reading: Forms of Attention and Distraction”
Munich, June 16-18, 2025
Joel Lande, Susanne Reichlin, and Carlos Spoerhase
In collaboration with Bailey E. Sincox, Johannes Wankhammer (Princeton) and the CRC “Cultures of Vigilance” (Munich)
The 2025 LMU-Princeton Summer Seminar explores the cultural history of attention and distraction, seeking to better understand historical continuities and discontinuities: What idealizations and vilifications of attention and distraction do we encounter in different eras? How has the fallibility of human concentration been historically understood? How is attention cultivated and habituated, and what bodily practices (sitting, kneeling, walking) and media (devotional images, recitation, bells) shape it? What historical distinctions – for example, between voluntary and involuntary attention – can be observed? Must attention always be directed transitively toward an object? What intransitive varieties of attention, often described as mere openness and objectless anticipation, do we find in mystical and other epistemic contexts?
Long before modernity, reading, as a paradigmatic attention-absorbing technique, played a special role in reflections on attention and distraction. Our seminar therefore explores reading as a “model case” for interdisciplinary debates about attention. From a cultural-historical perspective, we will inquire into when forms of distracted reading or self-forgetful reading become thematic; how texts’ ability to orient and manipulate our attention can be addressed; and how literary practices (philological criticism, close reading) can be situated in more encompassing historical frameworks of attention. Our goal is to investigate distraction and attention less as an opposition than as mutually conditioning poles, constantly redefining focal point and horizon. By examining the long history of practices and discourses that shape this relationship, we hope to rethink our own reading practices and to reassess contemporary discourses on the dangers of distraction. For further information about applying in English and German, please visit the LMU-PU page.
Complete event program forthcoming!
