Archived English Medieval Studies Events

International Conference
“The Power of Writing – Esoteric and Political Dimensions of Writing Systems”

16.–17.10.2026

This interdisciplinary conference, organised by Kerstin Majewski (English Medieval Studies) and Felix Siegmund (Premodern Korean Philology), and funded by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, explores the (re-)invention and (re-)coding of writing systems. Its focus lies on the meaning and use of ancient, historical, and newly invented writing systems beyond the purely linguistic level — so to speak, on a second-order level — both in the contemporary public sphere and in cultural, social, countercultural, and subcultural contexts. Bringing together international experts from Archaeology, Classical Philology, Egyptology, English Studies and Runology, Korean and Japanese Studies, Linguistics, Game Studies, Sinology, Slavic Studies, and Religious Studies, it seeks to answer the following questions regarding different historical cultures and writing systems:

• In which contexts have historical scripts been endowed with new meanings?
• How and why are supposedly “lost” meanings of writing systems (and of individual characters) rediscovered in the modern age?
• How and why do scientifically unfounded origin myths about scripts gain traction in different societal strands?
• Which conceptions of “community” and “identity” are shared across different cultures in the West and East in these processes of re-coding?