Conference: Enlightenment in the Contact Zone
International Conference
Enlightenment in the Contact Zone
Thursday May 28 | Saturday 30 2026 5 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Campus, Central Building, C40.704
The conference approaches the European Enlightenment as a product of intercultural
encounters shaped by scholarly and literary engagements with the “Orient” and the
“Americas”, as well as by colonial expansion, violence, and, at times, dialogue. It
foregrounds two different yet entangled trajectories: on the one hand, the realization
and radicalization of Enlightenment claims to universalism in “peripheral” contexts—
most strikingly in the Haitian Revolution. On the other hand, it highlights how intellectual
exchanges with Indigenous American and Islamic traditions fed back into European
thought, transforming its conceptions of reason, equality, and critique, and thereby
decentering the Enlightenment’s purportedly Western and Christian origins.
Organization:
Professorship for German and Comparative Literature, IGL (Maud Meyzaud and Oliver Precht)
Registration and further information:
Rosa.L.Westenberger@stud.leuphana.de
https://literatur-transkulturell.web.leuphana.de/ (derzeit im Aufbau)