Interdisciplinary conference Disiecta Membra: "Part and Whole: Scientific Approaches to Dispersed Things"

From November 27–28, 2025, the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz will host an interdisciplinary conference on the project "Disiecta membra: Stone Architecture and Urbanism in Roman Germany."

The body is an important topic of research in the humanities, both as a concrete entity and as a metaphor, and then mostly as a corpus. How is the body/corpus conceived in these sciences? Is it the ideal of a whole, where it is known what belongs to it and what parts it consists of? To which non-living entities is the metaphor applicable? What characteristics must a whole have in order to be understood as a body/corpus? How relevant are demarcation and divisibility? This is followed by the question of how to deal scientifically with the dispersion of parts. Are acts of division and dispersion the subject of research? What possibilities exist for researching and communicating acts of separation? Or is dispersion always an invitation to collect these parts and (re)assemble them? What criteria and premises does consolidating research follow? Are originality and perfection the research goals, and why?

We will discuss these and other topics together with scholars from the digital humanities, history, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, numismatics, and archaeology at the conference.

Program flyer

We kindly request registration here: https://events.adwmainz.de/disiectamembra/.