Liberal Arts Spring Colloquium: On Love

Concordia University’s Liberal Arts College and Vanier College’s Liberal Arts Program are pleased to announce the 2016 Spring Colloquium: On Love, April 1-2, 2016.

Machiavelli once said that it is better to be feared than to be loved while Saint Paul claimed that the greatest of the virtues is love. The power of love led the former to extol the virtues of the tyrant (or to mock them) and the latter to an original and inclusive view of a powerful new religion. Whichever view of love is correct, it cannot be doubted that love is a strong and fecund force in the history of ideas and literature in the West. The Liberal Arts Spring Colloquium invites proposals for papers and presentations which discuss the use, misuse and abuse of love in literature, history, politics, art, religion, philosophy and all disciplines closely associated with the Liberal Arts.

This two-day Colloquium will take place on April 1st (at Concordia) and April 2nd (at Vanier) and will include three panels on each day with three papers (of no more than 20 minutes) per panel, together with 30 minutes for questions and discussion. Of the six panels, one (on Saturday) will be devoted to student papers, while the remaining panels will allow faculty to present current research. Hence, this call for papers envisions/seeks 15 faculty papers and three student papers.

Each panel will be chaired by one faculty member and one student, and papers will be assigned to panels based on overlapping content, context, discipline or time period.