Third Space and Ancient World Studies

Date: 29-Oct-2025 - 31-Oct-2025
Location: Innsbruck, Austria
Contact: Alexander Steiner
Contact Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Cognitive Science; Historical Linguistics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 30-Jul-2025

We are pleased to announce that the Call for Papers for the international and interdisciplinary conference „Third Space and Ancient World Studies” is now open for submissions. The conference will be hosted by the Department of Ancient History and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Innsbruck from 29th to 31st of October 2025.
This conference seeks to develop the research on spatial perception in ancient societies by gathering scholars of any discipline in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Sciences and from any stage in their career to discuss spatial concepts from their own disciplinary perspective.

We welcome case studies as well as theoretical and methodological papers dealing with (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Comparative Approaches to Spatial Theory
- Gendered and other social Spaces
- Imperial Spaces
- Sacred Spaces
- Spatial Lexicon (of any language in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages)
- Spatial Metaphors
- Theoretical and/or Methodological Considerations concerning Third Spaces
- Urban and Rural Spaces
- Language and Spatial Cognition

We welcome proposals for 20-minutes papers. The abstract should not exceed 300 words and should be submitted to [email protected] by 30th of July 2025. The conference language will be English.

At least one session of the conference will be reserved for linguistic papers. The papers might deal with the relationship between language and spatial ‘thinking’. The focus is on ancient languages of any language family and/or theoretical approaches. Other topics concerning spatial perception and language will be considered as well.

Please note that the abstracts will be published online. A publication of the papers is planned. Early-career scholars are especially encouraged to send us their proposals.

Organisers
Alexander Steiner | [email protected]
Sina Kazemirashid | [email protected]