The Early Professional Interdisciplinary Conference was designed to bring together graduate students, post-docs, and lecturers within the first five years of appointment from any of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Its goals included the facilitation of professional development through interdepartmental idea exchange and collaboration, as well as the application of annual themes to better the understanding of teaching and learning within and between disciplines. This volume brings together approaches from Archaeology, Art History, Assyriology, Cinema, Cultural Anthropology, Egyptology, History, Literary Criticism, Marketing, Medieval Studies, Music, Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology to the theme of “meaning and λόγος.” Topics range from Urartian archaeology, Egyptian religious practice and Roman sculpture to Peppa Pig, brain imaging, heavy metal and the murals of Belfast. Thematic introductions ensure a coherence among and between the various chapters.
The word λόγος had many meanings in Ancient Greek: word, opinion, expectation, speech, principle, rhetorical argument, reason, and even meaning. Investigating how the meaning of a word links ideas and affects pedagogical issues began with Herakleitos and continues today. Logos is also the root of the suffix “–logy”, which is used to describe many of the fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences. As such, it provides an appropriate link between the many branches of investigation and scholarship included here.
