Black Sacred Arts Conference Series and CFP

July 15, 2021

The ISM is thrilled to announce a new interdisciplinary conference series launching in 2022 to study the music, ritual, and related arts of religious cultures of the Black Atlantic and beyond. The conversations envisioned in this series will place Black thought, worship, and practice in dialogue with multireligious perspectives that are linked with the arts. | Read more

2022: Africana Sacred Healing Arts

The first conference, to be held May 16–18, 2022, will explore the wide variety of rituals and practices related to healing in African and African Diasporic religions. 

  • In what ways do suffering and affliction activate aesthetic responses?
  • How do the Black healing arts inflect disease, illness, and sickness on individual, social, and political bodies?

Registration opens fall 2021. | Read more

If you would like to be on a list to receive notifications of the conferences, please email ismconferences@yale.edu.

Call for Proposals

The ISM invites proposals for papers, presentations, and artistic performances that address topics including, but not limited to

  • Expanding definitions of the healing arts, illness, and unwellness
  • Arts of healing and baptism/initiation
  • Arts of healing and mortuary rites
  • Healing as experienced transnationally and in the digital world
  • Healing arts and the senses (inclusive of extra-sensory modes)
  • Therapeutic arts of music, dance, and performance
  • Medicine, materiality, and the arts
  • Relationships between healing, religion, and the medical sciences
  • The various identities of healers

Submission deadline: September 15, 2021

NOTE:  Accepted presenters and performers in attendance will receive an allowance to help defray the cost of travel to New Haven. In addition, they will be provided hotel accommodation and several meals during the conference. | Read more

Questions? email ismconferences@yale.edu