The 'Occident and Orient' research group invites offers of collaboration from young and established scholars alike working in the later-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The project is to place particular emphasis upon the particularities of the realtionship between German language culture and the cultural traditions of the Middle East and Indian subcontinent in the first instance, as this an area still under-researched in comparison to Anglo-Oriental and Franco-Oriental encounters. Offers from scholars in French and English studies are still welcome, however. The approach is to be comparative and inter-disciplinary, involving cultural and literary studies, philosophy and history. Typical research projects will involve, amongst others:
* Examining discourses of communication between Occidental and Oriental writers and traditions (one culture's literary responses to literary works generated by the other): 'Oriental' traditions of engaging with, representing and communicating with European/German culture are of particular interest

* Examining traditions of thought and culture which seek to experiment with and cross lines of perceived cultural and linguistic difference between 'East' and 'West' in the period. This will involve re-evaluating Edward Said's model by which cultural and historical processes in the West came to shape a static and silenced 'Orient'

* Examining histories and representation of Occidental-Oriental relations as a clash of fundamentally opposed civilizations

* Examining different ways by which trans-national mobility (travel, trade, correspondence, colonization and invasion) effected the construction of the Occident within the Orient, and vice versa.

Interested parties should contact James Hodkinson. The research group is to be based around a new working relationship between Warwick University, UK and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. There will be one to two yearly meetings in the UK, India and elsewhere: these will take the form of two to three day symposia, with the first planned for Spring/ Summer 2009 in India.