We are particularly interested in interrogating under-analyzed types of work and space. For example, we hope to develop the theorization of types of work that critics have not conventionally understood as ‘work’ (the performance of music as practical activity, for instance). We also aim to bring attention to under-analysed spaces. For example, due to Romanticism’s traditionally rural focus, literary critics of this period have only recently begun to interrogate urban spaces; interdisciplinary discussion of urbanism in this period would therefore be particularly valuable.

In terms of knowledge, we are particularly interested in forms of knowledge often essentialized and therefore not understood as knowledge as such. The traditionally male knowledge of utilising a commanding voice and demeanour to assert a seemingly innate authority, for example; or the traditionally female knowledge of being able to correctly ascertain the freshness of produce. We aim to elucidate the complex nuances of the interfacing of work, space, and knowledge as three factors that fundamentally shape everyday life in order to gain a greater understanding of material life in the period.

Possible questions which articles might tackle could include:
• How do workers and their work uniquely shape space?
• How does space facilitate or hinder workers and their work?
• How is knowledge acquired, employed, or altered by types of work and working locations?
• How do the social relationships between workers and their supervisors/masters alter according to the work they are doing and the spaces in which they perform it? How does the knowledge encoded in levels of expertise affect the dynamic between supervisors and workers?
• How is knowledge encoded in gender, race, and/or class across working space?

Possible approaches could include, but are not limited to: genteel work and the city; the work of acquiring the necessary knowledge for genteel status; work in spaces of ‘leisure’ and the forms of knowledge encoded therein; work, knowledge, and (sub)urban domestic spaces; gendered working knowledge in the home; space and female accomplishment and the forms of knowledge encoded; working knowledge in relation to emergent manufacturing/industrial spaces.

Pickering & Chatto have expressed an interest in publishing the collection. The exact word length may change, but we expect articles will be approximately 8000 words in length.

Abstracts for proposed articles should be 500 words in length, and be submitted no later than 15 September 2012. Please send abstracts to spacesofwork [at] gmail [dot] com

Announcing a two-day International Conference, hosted by the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies,  Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Click here for the complete flyer.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on all aspects of Romantic voyaging, the period, its context and  its authors. Papers which address the larger issues of ‘voyaging’ will be welcome too. The conference will  include an opportunity to admire some of the treasures of the Rare Book collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library. There will also be time to explore the bracing sea-front and beautiful streets of Wellington with its  numerous restaurants and bars, and to ascend via the famous cable car to the Botanical Gardens.

The keynote speakers are:

Dr Ruth Lightbourne (Alexander Turnbull Library)
Professor Vincent O’Sullivan, DCNZM
Professor Nicholas Roe (St Andrews University, Scotland)

250 word proposals for papers of no more than 2750 words  together with a brief c.v. should occupy no more than 2 sides of  A4 in a Word document (they will be copied into a composite file).  Please do not send as a pdf. E-mail to the Conference Organizer Heidi Thomson heidi (dot) thomson (at) vuw.ac.nz by 1 April 2012. All other enquiries should also be e-mailed to this address.

The Charles Brown Bursary of NZ $550 will be available to enable one unfunded postgraduate scholar working in the field of Romantic Literature (currently enrolled at either MA or PhD level) to travel to and deliver a paper at this conference. Please bring this announcement to the attention of qualified applicants.

Registration and website details are to follow.

Delegates need to arrange their own accommodation. There are a large number of Hotels and B&Bs in Wellington. Hotels within walking distance of the conference venue include: Novotel, Rydges, Intercontinental, Ibis, Bolton, Kingsgate Hotel

The following website is useful for arranging accommodation: http://www.wellingtonnz.com/accommodation

32nd Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

March 3-6, 2011 at Arizona State University, Tempe & Phoenix, Arizona

How was money understood in the nineteenth century? in its global context? by laborers? How did the ideation of money evolve around and through art, music, race, nation, and empire? How did the stories told about money influence people and practices? What role do myths play in comprehending money? How were relations between people mediated by narratives of money? relations between nations? This theme would invite papers and panel proposals concerning any aspect of money/myth during the long nineteenth century, including, but not limited to the “myths” or “realities” of trade, debt, industry and investment, economics, money-lending, poverty, consumer culture, class relations, race relations and their economic implications, gender politics, masculinity and femininity as shaped by/of money, sexual politics, sexuality and the law, aesthetics, art and art collecting, theater and performance politics, religion and wealth, social service programs, education, travel, entertainment, sporting, financing and producing wealth through science, international connections and compacts, public/private divide, differential health care, class mobility, marriage, widowhood, inheritance, prostitution, child rearing, infanticide, property politics, movements motivated by money (Chartism, socialism, communism, trades unions, reform), immigration, empire, war, and slavery. Equally welcome are paper and panel proposals concerning the processes of creating mythic structures around money including governmental campaigns, the publishing industry, legal processes, military campaigns, advertising, propaganda, and novelizations.

Abstracts (250 words) for 20 minute papers, author’s name and paper title in heading, with one page c.v. by September 15, 2010: Marlene Tromp, Program Chair, Denison University: nsca [at] denison [dot] edu

Presenters will be notified by December 15, 2010.

Graduate students whose proposals are accepted can at that point submit a full-length version of the paper to compete for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses. Registration and accommodation information available November 15, 2010 at http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/index.html

Keynote Speaker:

Mary Poovey, Samuel Rudin University Professor of the Humanities, Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge and Department of English, New York University. Author of Genres of the Credit Economy (2008), A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (1998), Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (1995), Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1989), and The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (1984), all with University of Chicago Press.

Recent literary studies have generally assumed that regionalism emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century in response to the consolidation of the modern nation-state, imperial expansion, and industrialization, all of which tended to efface cultural, and to some extent geographical, differences among sub-national communities. Yet during the long eighteenth century, various literary and cultural developments—from newspapers, novels, dictionaries, and poems, to antiquarianism, topography, travel writings, and statistical surveys— reflected, and arguably participated in creating, local and regional forms of community. No Place Like Home will explore the idea that regionalism and localism— or, more generally, the aesthetic expressions of sub-national cultural, political, or geographic identities —may have preceded, or at least accompanied, the rise of the nation-state. Our proposed collection aims to challenge “rise of the nation” narratives by exploring forms of regional and local affiliation in British literature and culture in the 150 years preceding the nation-state’s emergence as the paradigmatic form of community in Western Europe. We are therefore soliciting contributions that investigate any of the following topics as they relate to British literature and culture between 1660 and 1830:

– the emergence of regionalism as an aesthetic, cultural, and/ or political category
– the development of the concept of the local (especially in contradistinction to the competing claims of the national and the global or cosmopolitan)
– the evolution of discourses of “rootedness,” “aboriginality” or other forms of sub-national belonging, identification, or community

Please send 500-word abstracts for essays of 5,000 to 7,000 words, along with brief academic CVs, to Evan Gottlieb (evan.gottlieb[at]oregonstate.edu) and Juliet Shields (js37[at]u.washington.edu) by September 1, 2009 .

Four Dimensions: Spatio-Temporal Shifts Reflected in Nineteenth-Century Literature (panel name)

Indisputably, the categories of space and time shift massively in the nineteenth-century; technology speeds experience just as urban growth and land acquisition distort space. In 1750 it took 3 days to travel from Manchester to London; by 1850, it took 6 hours. In 1866 one could even send a message almost instantly from Ireland to Canada across Cyrus Field’s transatlantic cable. The quickening of experiential time was also tied to the spatial developments which required travel technology and created new proximities: between 1810 and 1860, while the country acquired huge tracks of western land, the urban population in the United States increased from 6% to 20%, and by 1861 London, the largest city in the world, reached almost 3 million people. This panel will consider these spatial and temporal developments and their effect on nineteenth-century English language literature on both sides of the Atlantic. How are changing experiences of time and space represented in literary descriptions or emplotment? How do spatio-temporal concerns relate to literary markets and publishing trends such as serialization—that stretching of a story across time in a certain allotted space? Can we graft these notions of changing space and time onto actual events represented in literature? Those who fought or witnessed the Civil War knew they were experiencing a historical moment, one out of time, as they were within it. How do these spatio-temporal concerns relate to imperialism? How do they play out for immigrants, displaced persons, or colonized subjects? Papers focusing on any result of the manner in which time and space experientially alter within the nineteenth-century are welcome. Please send 300 – 500 word abstracts, brief biographical statements, and contact information (postal address, email address, and phone number) for 15 – 20 minute presentations to Lydia Fash (lfash[at]brandeis.edu). Deadline is September 30, 2009.

About the Conference

41st Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 7-11, 2010
Montreal, Quebec – Hilton Bonaventure

The 41st Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Details and the complete Call for Papers for the 2010 Convention will be posted in June: www.nemla.org.

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable. Please note that A/V use comes with a $10 fee.

Travel to Canada now requires a passport for U.S. citizens. Please get your passport application in early.

The University of Tampa, March 11-13, 2010, Tampa, Florida

Dramatic expression and self-conscious performances marked almost every aspect of nineteenth century life and artistic culture, as theatrical turns and performative mindsets introduced in the 17th-18th centuries expanded in the 1780s through the beginning of World War One. We invite paper and panel proposals that explore these themes and subjects in the long Nineteenth Century (1780-1914). Papers might address the theatrical shows—whether serious drama, circus displays, vaudeville, operas, or Shakespearean revivals—that appeared in cities and towns on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as in more distant lands). Or they might investigate how politics, social events, military engagements, domestic affairs, public trials, crime reports, religious rituals, architectural spaces, sculptural moments, exhibition halls, artistic and musical compositions, and the early moving pictures of the cinema, assumed a theatrical sensibility. Welcome also are proposals for papers and panels that bring scholarly and theoretical interests in performativity to bear on concepts of identity, individuality, and audience in the given era.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 500 words along with a brief (one page) c.v. to the Program Co-Chairs, Janice Simon (U of Georgia) and Regina Hewitt (U of South Florida) at the conference address ncsa2010[at]earthlink.net by Sept. 15, 2009. Speakers will be notified by or before Dec. 15.

Any graduate student whose proposal is accepted may at that point submit a full-length version of the paper in competition for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses.

Conference sessions will be held at the University of Tampa, a campus with both the historic late-19th century Plant Hall (formerly the Tampa Bay Hotel) and a state-of-the-art conference center. Accommodations will be available at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tampa, a short walk from campus. For further information—available in midsummer—please visit the NCSA website or contact Elizabeth Winston, Local Arrangements Director (U of Tampa), at the conference address ncsa2010[at]earthlink.net.

Romanticism and the City

The fall 2009 meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism will convene in New York City from November 5 to November 8 to address the topic “Romanticism and the City.” The meeting will be jointly hosted by The City College and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Submissions engaging with some aspect of the general theme are welcome from all disciplines, including but not limited to literary studies, history, philosophy, and political science.

From Wordsworth’s description of Lyrical Ballads as a response to “the increasing accumulation of men in cities” to Baudelaire’s location of the impetus for his prose poetry in  “la fréquentation des villes énormes,” the history of Romanticism is bound up with a continuous and evolving response to the emergence of the modern city. As work in a range of areas in our own day leads us to reconsider how we think about such oppositions as nature and culture, the organic and the mechanical, wholeness and multiplicity, the urban text or sub-text of Romanticism presents itself not only as a comparatively neglected area of investigation but as a place to pursue this rethinking.

These observations are offered to prompt debate and, above all, to invite a broadened conception of the historical reach of Romanticism in the formulation of proposals. Proposals for individual papers should be limited to 500 words and emailed to icrnyc[at]ccny.cuny.edu no later than May 1, 2009. General proposals for special sessions should be also limited to 500 words, or 1000 words if comprising sub-proposals, and emailed to icrnyc[at]ccny.cuny.edu no later than March 1, 2009.

Keynote Lecturers

Part 1 (27 July to 1 August)

Frances Ferguson, Paul H Fry, Stephen Gill, Claire Lamont, Nicholas Roe, Fiona Stafford

Part 2 (1 to 6 August)

The Summer Conference is in two parts or 5 nights each, with a changeover day on 1 August. The registration fee of £185 (or £155 for one part only) includes all excursions.

Full Board hotel rates for 10 nights range from £550 to £740, and youth hostel rates are £165 (5 nights) or £330 (10 nights) with a discount for those electing to share a room. For full details please see the downloadable pdf prospectus on the conference website.

All participants must register for the whole of Part 1, or Part 2, or Both and should do so by 27 April 2009. Fees rise to £200 (both parts) and £170 (one part) on 28 April. Because both resident and non-resident places are limited, early registration is advised. Accommodation costs are payable in full by 25 May, after which date no refunds of fees or other costs can be guaranteed (participants are therefore advised to take out travel insurance).

Contributions may take the form of short papers (2750 words) which are scheduled at two papers to a session or workshops (short handout-based presentations leading into an hour or more of discussion).

There is no theme for the conference and papers may address any aspect of British Romantic Studies, including comparative studies, though papers acknowledging the bicentenary of Charles Darwin would be especially timely.

Proposals (250–500 words) will be considered by two members of the Board of Trustees, should incorporate a brief c.v. (no more than one side of A4) and should be submitted in a single email attachment to wordsworth_conferences@hotmail.co.uk by 23 March 2009.

13 Bursaries are available ranging in value from £250 to £300.

For full details please visit the conference website and download the PDF Prospectus

Dr Richard Gravil
Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE richardgravil@hotmail.com

The Wordsworth Conference Foundation: Registered Charity No. 1124319
http://www.wordsworthconferences.org.uk

The fall 2009 meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism will convene in New York City from November 5 to November 8 to address the topic “Romanticism and the City.” The meeting will be jointly hosted by The City College and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Submissions engaging with some aspect of the general theme are welcome from all disciplines, including but not limited to literary studies, history, philosophy, and political science.

Plenary Speakers:
Alexander Gelley, University of California-Irvine
Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan
Michael Moon, Emory University

From Wordsworth’s description of Lyrical Ballads as a response to “the increasing accumulation of men in cities” to Baudelaire’s location of the impetus for his prose poetry in “la fréquentation des villes énormes,” the history of Romanticism is bound up with a continuous and evolving response to the emergence of the modern city. As work in a range of areas in our own day leads us to reconsider how we think about such oppositions as nature and culture, the organic and the mechanical, wholeness and multiplicity, the urban text or sub-text of Romanticism presents itself not only as a comparatively neglected area of investigation but as a place to pursue this rethinking.

These observations are offered to prompt debate and, above all, to invite a broadened conception of the historical reach of Romanticism in the formulation of proposals. Proposals for individual papers should be limited to 500 words and emailed to icrnyc_at_ccny.cuny.edu no later than May 1, 2009. General proposals for special sessions should be also limited to 500 words, or 1000 words if comprising sub-proposals, and emailed to: icrnyc_at_ccny.cuny.edu no later than March 1, 2009.