Past Conferences:
Mindful Body in Healing and the Arts , The Center for Body, Mind and Culture hosted a 2-day conference, January 19th-20th, 2012, with keynote speaker, Anne Harrington, Harvard University, author of "The Cure Within". Regarding the body as sentient, purposive subjectivity (rather than mere physical flesh), the conference focused on ways that somatic mindfulness can contribute to health, healing, and aesthetic experience. Presentations dealt with disciplines of mindful body consciousness (Asian and Western) and their applications in the areas of wellness, fitness, and the arts.Bodies of Art , The Center for Body, Mind and Culture and the Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies hosted a two-day conference, Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 2010, at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Conference themes, with a focus on art and visual culture, include: the embodied artist, concerning issues of maker and material, inscriptions of the self, or the somatic experience of the creative process; the body in pieces (pace Nochlin), considering the fragment, the crop, dismemberment, or erasure; the en-gendered object, how gender and sexuality are expressed, represented or suppressed; the corpus, or other bodily metaphors for the Å“uvre, canon or process of creation; and finally the body as art, in all its manifestations.
French Cultures of Embodiment , The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture and the French Program in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Campus hosted Conference on French Cultures of Embodiment 25-27 March 2010.To view the conference details, click here.
Conference on Art and Ritual in Asian Cultures , March 20-21, 2009. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida. Click here for the conference schedule. Art and ritual empower individuals to communicate their innermost sentiments across temporal, spatial and social boundaries.  They offer frameworks and media through which bodily confines are transcended through the structuring support of religious and secular institutions. Art and ritual are exemplary in showing how society shapes our bodily comportment and how, conversely, refined and stylized somatic performance help sustain our institutions and even transform social contexts.
Conference schedule           List of speakers       Conference Flyer      Images from the conference Bodies in Motion: Explorations in Perception and Performance , Boca Raton, Dec. 4-5, 2008. The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton organized this conference to explore aspects of embodied perception and performance from a variety of humanistic perspectives. The conference was especially focused on research that treats the issues of embodiment, perception, and performance in connection with the arts and with somaesthetic disciplines of mindfulness. For more details on this conference click here.
The Human Nature and Self: Pragmatist Theory from European Perspectives
This conference took place in the FAU University Center Sago Palm Room from 2 - 4:30 PM on Thursday, March 20, 2008. The conference featured two international guest speakers, Kacper Bartczak and Hans-Peter Krueger.
Dr. Bartczak presented a paper on " Self-creation and Creative Strategies in Neo-pragmatist Philosophy and the Poetry of John Ashbery."
Dr. Krueger presented a paper entitled, " On Human Nature: Dewey's and Plessner's Philosopical Anthropologies."
Discussion followed the papers, along with a response from Dr. Richard Shusterman, Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities.
Revisiting the French Connection
This international, bilingual conference on French philosophy and contemporary art took place December 3 and 4, 2007. For more information, click (for English) ou cliquer (pour français).
Minding the Body: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
This inaugural conference of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture took place March 29 and 30, 2007 in FAU's room PA 101. After an introduction by Richard Shusterman on Thursday, Arthur C. Danto, Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and Art Critic for The Nation, delivered a keynote presentation on "The Body in Philosophy and Art."
Friday's presentations included the following: Mark Johnson (U of Oregon) on "The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetic Dimensions of Human Understanding"; Mark Csikszentmihalyi (U of Wisconsin at Madison) on "Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China"; Shaun Gallagher (U of Central Florida) on "Pathologies of the Lived Body"; Jane Caputi (Florida Atlantic U) on "The Pornography of Everyday Life"; and Marlaine Smith (Florida Atlantic U) on "Touch as Therapy"; as well as commentary and full-panel discussion with additional faculty, including Kenneth Holloway (Florida Atlantic U)
