We are writing to draw your attention to a conference on “Constructing the ‘Public Intellectual’ in the Premodern World”, which is to held in Manchester on 5-6 September 2019. Details can be found at http://genealogiesofknowledge.net/events/public-intellectual/, including a link to the list of abstracts.

The registration fee for graduate students is £80 for the two-day conference, but the Graduate School have indicated potential willingness (though not a definitive commitment) to fund some bursaries for UoM PhD students, if a case can be made for support from the Graduate School’s training budget. Rather than inviting individual applications for funding, they have asked us to put together a collective application with a list of names. So we are writing to ask for expressions of interest to be sent to Stephen.Todd@manchester.ac.uk no later than Friday 28 June.

An obvious feature of a collective application to the Graduate School’s training budget will be the interdisciplinarity of the conference, and the opportunity that it provides for you to interact with scholars working in other disciplines that may be relevant to your own research. With that in mind, it would be helpful if your expression of interest could not only include a brief indication of your own PhD topic and academic discipline(s), but also highlight one or two of the conference papers that are particularly of interest for your own research but that are not obviously linked to your own academic discipline (as well as any that are so linked): nb, this is to enable us to support our bid with a selection of specific examples, rather than an academic popularity contest. Please feel free also to mention if there are any other person-specific training benefits that you foresee.

You will notice from the conference website that registration has already opened, but we would suggest that those interested in applying for bursary funding should hold back for the moment rather than registering, until we know the outcome of our funding application, which will probably be some time in July (this is so that we can minimise the number of cases where we might have to refund the payment of registration fees). But please feel free to express interest in bursary funding even if you have already paid.

Given the range of interests covered by the conference, we anticipate that the majority of interest will come from PhD students in the following academic disciplines: Arabic/Islamic Studies; Classics & Ancient History; Mediaeval + Early Modern + Nineteenth-Century Studies (in a range of departments); and Translation Studies. But we have asked to send it to all SALC PhD students, as the most convenient way of ensuring that we have not missed anybody.

Stephen Todd

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