History of Imagination Conference in May 2022

For decades, students of intellectual history and the history of political thought have paid very little attention to the imagination. Recent years, however, saw a growing recognition of the centrality of imagination in the history of philosophy and science and increasing scholarly attention to the recovery of the history of imagination. The imagination has fascinated generations of thinkers and occupied a central place in the work of philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. From antiquity, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance and up to early modernity and the Enlightenment, it has been assigned a crucial role in sense perception and knowledge production and in the explanation of both human creativity and innovation and human fallibility and vulnerability to deception and sedition. The history of the mind and the soul, as it now becomes increasingly clear, is intimately intertwined with the history of imagination.

The History of Imagination Conference aims to explore the ways in which the history of imagination has influenced political thought and how political thinkers have understood the problems and possibilities of stability, governance, authority, and legitimacy. By contributing to the recovery of the historical significance of this concept, the Conference also seeks to generate new insights for the contemporary study of the role of imagination in politics. Organized by Avshalom Schwartz (PhD candidate of political science at Stanford) and Alicia Steinmetz (postdoctoral scholar at Yale and a former SCI postdoctoral fellow) and generously supported by the Zephyr Institute and The Stanford Humanities Center, the conference will take place on May 2022 at Stanford. 

This History of Imagination Conference will bring together, for the first time, the leading scholars of the history of imagination for a weekend-long discussion of the history, and future, of the study of the imagination. Since many of these scholarly developments are very recent, scholarly work on the history of the imagination has tended to be a fairly solitary endeavor. By facilitating this kind of scholarly exchange for the first time, this conference aims to collect and codify the available knowledge on the history of imagination and the role of imagination in the history of political thought, and to establish a collective research agenda that could guide the future directions of this rapidly emerging field. Towards this end, the papers presented at the conference are currently collected into a first-of-its-kind edited volume on the history and present of the political imagination.