In the past few months I've been corresponding with Bernard Laks, Jérôme Ségal, and John Goldsmith about our shared interests in cybernetics, linguistics, and transatlantic scientific exchange after World War II. For an even longer time I' been following the work of Ronan Le Roux who, along with Jérôme (as well as Céline Lafontaine and Lydia Liu, for that matter), has played a leading role in mapping out the place of information theory within the human sciences. I'm delighted that I'll have the opportunity to present and discuss research with all three of them in the coming months. On May 8th I'll give a talk to Jérôme's department at the University of Vienna. On March 26th, I'll discuss related topics at a conference at the Paris Center of the University of Chicago organized by Drs. Laks and Goldsmith. The announcement for the Paris event is below.

The Confluence of American and European Thought in the mid-20th Century: Immigrés, Cyberneticians, Linguists

The Paris Center of the University of Chicago in the 13th arrondissement will host a one-day conference on this theme on March 26, 2013, with the aim of bringing together historians and scholars of linguistics, of the cybercognitive sciences, and of related disciplines. Among the subjects covered will be the interaction in New York of the American and European linguists during the 1940s and 1950s; the significance of the rise of cybernetics during this period; the intellectual and financial commitment to machine translation in the post-War scene, in both the West and the East; the role of private foundations and government funding in these areas as well as area studies.

Programme:
9h30h-10h30 : Jacqueline Léon,  CNRS, Paris Diderot, Les débuts de la traduction automatique aux USA, en URSS et en France : intégrations, transferts, passages

10h30-11h30  Patrick Sériot (Université de Lausanne) "Frontières et limites : la notion de géographie phonologique chez Jakobson dans les années 1930"

11h30-12h30 Laurent Jeanpierre (Université Paris 8) : New York, "laboratoire linguistique du monde" dans les années 1940.

Pause déjeuné

14h-15h Jérôme Ségal (Université de Vienne) : L’influence de la cybernétique et de son contexte de développement dans l’évolution de la linguistique

15h-16H Ronan Le Roux (Université de Paris 1) : "Relations entre cybernétique et sciences cognitives : état des lieux des options historiographiques".

16h-17h Bernard Geoghegan (Université de Berlin) : Tirades in the Trading Zone: Shannon, Chomsky, and Jakobson on Language and Information

17h-18H Final round table :  John Goldsmith (Université de Chicago) and Bernard Laks (Université de Paris Ouest).
The presentations will be primarily in French. The meeting is open to the public, but pre-registration is encouraged to help us organize. If you would like to attend, please send an email to John Goldsmith goldsmith@uchicago.edu. and laks@u-paris10.fr
 

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