Brill book series, Studies in Somaesthetics, CfP: Somaesthetics and Bodies in the Eighteenth Century
The eighteenth century is often celebrated as the Age of Reason, symbolized by the metaphor of “light,” as evoked in the term Enlightenment (Aufklärung). Yet it was equally an age of sensibility, sensation, and embodied experience. Aesthetics emerged during this period as a formal discipline, founded by Alexander Baumgarten as a science of sensory perception. At the same time, philosophical anthropology began to take shape in the writings of thinkers such as Kant, Herder, Winckelmann, Montesquieu, and Dubos. This era also witnessed the rapid development of scientific fields—including medicine and early neuroscience—which deepened contemporary understandings of the body and its role in perception and knowledge. Neoclassicism flourished alongside these developments, with figures like Winckelmann at its forefront. His passionate engagement with ancient sculpture exemplified a renewed, empathetic appreciation for the human body in art, continuing a legacy that began in the Renaissance. However, the Enlightenment project, for all its ambitions of rational freedom from prejudice, was not immune to racism and sexism—forms of exclusion that were often grounded in the very notions of embodiment it sought to explore.
In this context, we invite scholars to investigate the rich intersections between somaesthetics—the critical study of embodied experience and sensory practice, which positions the body not merely as a passive object but as an active site of perception, cultivation, and aesthetic engagement—and the intellectual, cultural, and artistic life of the “long” eighteenth century.
Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):
- The soma or lived body in Enlightenment philosophy (Vico, Baumgarten, Rousseau, Diderot, Herder, Condillac, etc.) and literature
- philosophical anthropology
- Prehistory of somaesthetics in the eighteenth century
- Embodiment in aesthetic theory and senses (touch, taste, and smell)
- The suffering bodiesin art and literature
- The racialized body in theory and practice
- The Gendered and sexualized body
- Clothing and self-fashioning of the body in literature and art
- Bodies in art history and art theories
- The performative or theatrical body
- Bodies in politics
- . Proposal Deadline: 15th November, 2025.
This edited volume will be published in the Brill book series edited by Richard Shusterman, Studies in Somaesthetics: Embodied Perspectives in Philosophy, the Arts, and the Human Sciences. Volume editor: (Aura) Yanping Gao
