2006 Conference. Aug. 31st - Sept. 3rd. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN USA
NASSR SPECIAL SESSIONS
Click here for NAVSA Special Sessions
Special Sessions are open-call sessions vetted by individual scholars; all papers not accepted to the special sessions will be given a second evaluation by the general conference committee. If you wish to be considered for a special session, please send your proposal directly to the following e-mail addresses.
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As engagements with "Romantic Science" become increasingly varied and
complex, references to the life and works of Erasmus Darwin appear with
increasing frequency in a multitude of contexts. Similarly, treatments of
Darwin's connections to contemporary literary figures, as well as
reexaminations of his own status as a popular poet, suggest that sustained
attention to Darwin can further enrich our understandings of the relation
between poetry and science. Papers exploring any aspect of these issues in
Darwin's works will be considered. Possible topics may include: Darwin and
Evolutionary Thought; Poetics of Zoology and/or Botany; Darwin and the
Lives of the Mind; Darwin Among the Romantics; Dr. Darwin as Popular Poet. Submit to this special session by e-mailing James Allard at jallard@brocku.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be
submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format
by February 15, 2006.
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This panel will focus on the influence of alternative, now superseded forms of science and medicine in the Romantic era, including alchemy, physiognomy, phrenology, quackery, and charlatanism. Proposals may address alchemy as a precursor of enlightenment science, alchemy in Gothic literature, the literary influence of Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy , physiognomy and portraiture, phrenology and Romantic-era conceptions of the mind, superstition and quackery in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century medicine, Mesmerism in literature, famous charlatans (such as Cagliostro), or any other topic relevant to Romantic pseudosciences. Submit to this special session by e-mailing William D. Brewer at brewerwd@appstate.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be
submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format
by February 15, 2006.
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marquis de sade and the scientia and techne of eroticism
Frederick Burwick, Professor Emeritus of English, U of California, Los Angeles
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This panel is dedicated to the examination of the literary impact of Sade's novels and plays and the appropriation of the erotic "toys" from his accounts of sexual activities. Both in his novels and in his plays, Sade introduces mechanical devices to assist or enhance sexual activities. These devices are also employed specifically to heighten dramatic interest and action on the stage, and the complex apparatus often up-stages or even usurps the action. Sade's influence on English Gothic literature has sustained continued interest since it was first elaborated in Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony ( La carne, la morte, e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica . 1933). Submit to this special session by e-mailing Frederick Burwick at fburwick@humnet.ucla.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15 , 2006.
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Newton and Newtonian thought had a decisive and multifaceted influence on the Romantics. This panel solicits papers on Romantic engagements with Newton and with the eighteenth-century figures who used Newton to rethink society, economics, epistemology, and emotion in new, often revolutionary ways. Possible examples include but are not limited to Newton's rewriting of traditional symbols, such as the apple, in ways that deflect them from the Judeo-Christian heritage and recontextualize them as figures of scientific knowledge; the appropriation by post-Newtonians of gravity as an analogy for the social glue that binds us; and the prominence of Newton, Newtonian figures, and Newtonian acolytes in Romantic debates about the body and the body politic. In short, how can we read Newton's influence on realms which might seem far removed from the fields of his own writings. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Chris Dilworth at c_dilwor@alcor.concordia.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15 , 2006.
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Crises and their Religious Consequences
Carol Engelhardt, Associate Professor of History, Wright State U
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In the long 19th century, English culture was, on the public level and in private, a broadly religious culture, yet too often religion is studied in isolation from secular culture. This panel seeks to collapse this distinction by exploring how moments of domestic and international crises affected religious beliefs, doctrines, practices, and even ecclesiastical appointments. These formative moments include but are not limited to major events such as the Peterloo Massacre, the potato famine in Ireland, the Indian Mutiny, and the Boer War; a local crisis or disturbance such as those occasioned by the Luddites or Chartists might also have had religious repercussions. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Carol Engelhardt at carol.engelhardt@wright.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006 .
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Papers are invited that explore the emergence of psychoanalytical or psychiatric thinking and techniques in the Romantic period, or that explore psychoanalytical approaches to Romantic literature and culture. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Joel Faflak at jfaflak@uwo.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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Papers should address the perils and/or pleasures of interdisciplinarity in dealing with the body during the long nineteenth century. Possible topics include but are not limited to the following: the intersection of the history of medicine and literary studies; the status of the body as an object of study in present scholarship; the social body; sexualities and the law; disease, mortality, reproduction and economics; the colonial or colonized body; race, ethnicity and nation; the concept of the corpus. Submit to this special session by emailing Pamela Gilbert at pgilbert@clas.ufl.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be no longer than two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae, and should be submitted electronically in the body of the email, or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format, by February 15, 2006.
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Papers are invited that explore romantic visuality between Burke's aesthetics and the rise of photography. Focal topics include but are not limited to Blake's plates; hypotyposis as the figure of romantic visuality (esp. Coleridge, Rodolphe Gasche on Kant in The Idea of Form); poetry and photography; the romantic image as snapshot; the verbal icon and/in emergent visual culture; Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian writers; photography and the Pre-Raphaelites; camera obscuras. Submit to this special session by e-mailing A. C. Goodson atgoodson@msu.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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From Peacock to Sokal and Back: 19th-Century Culture Wars Revisited
Jens M. Gurr , Privatdozent of English, Duisburg-Essen U
Ten years after the Sokal affair, it may be worthwile to revisit 19th-century debates on literature and science and their respective roles in education from a specifically 21st-century perspective. What is the role of literature and of the humanities in education, within the university, in the modern world in general? This session aims to bring together papers taking a fresh look at Peacock and Shelley on poetry and science, Cardinal Newman on the university, Huxley and Arnold on literature, science and education or other famous or forgotten controversies and interventions on the subject in the 19th century. Without being too apologetic about our fields, a look at these texts and debates may well be of interest at a time when the "utility" of what we do is questioned in ways not radically different from those in the early 19th century. A wide variety of approaches is welcome so long as papers about the debate in some sense "make it new." Submit to this special session by e-mailing Jens M. Gurr at jens.gurr@uni-due.de and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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AGAINST TECHNOLOGY: GENERAL LUDD, CAPTAIN SWING, AND THEIR LEGACIES
Steven Jones , Professor of English, Loyola U of Chicago
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This session will focus on the history and cultural legacy of machine-wrecking and rick-burning protests of the early nineteenth century, from Luddism (1811-1816) to the "Swing Riots" of the 1830s and beyond. Papers may address either these specific historical movements (and labor subcultures) or their representations, echoes, and appropriations in romantic, Victorian and modern anti-industrial and anti-technology protests or cultural productions, whether in European, American, or global contexts. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Steven Jones at sjones1@luc.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
Inhibiting Scientia: Romanticism and the Ethics of Knowledge
Jacques Khalip , Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
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While certain critical trends in Romantic studies often characterize the era's attitude to knowledge—knowledge of the self, of ideas, of other persons—as possessed by a spirit of appropriative power and endless consumption, they often fail to appreciate the possibility that the period also sustains an ethical respect for desisting from the desire to relentlessly know. This panel will explore how writings of the Enlightenment and Romantic period differently abstain from and inhibit such a compulsion to produce knowledge at all costs, and how these abstentions and inhibitions are related to the ethical imagination. In what ways are reflections on the limits of knowledge also related to questions of identity, otherness, and self-disclosure? How do texts of the period (literary, philosophical, scientific, legal, etc.) work to halt, interrupt, or suspend the rage to know, to act, and to make? How do writers explore the aesthetic as a mode of cognition that blocks mastery? And how do figures of ignorance, naïveté, melancholy, stupidity, or blank refusal evoke the ethical and cultural anxieties that attend knowledge production? Submit to this special session by e-mailing Jacques Khalip at khalipj@mcmaster.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should not exceed two pages (500 words) and should be submitted with a one page curriculum vitae by attachment or in the body of an email by February 15, 2006.
Recountings: Romantic and Victorian Finance
Sara Malton , Assistant Professor of English, Saint Mary's University
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This panel will focus on the varying risks and rewards of financial practices as they emerge in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Especially welcome are papers that consider how financial disruptions, controversies, or transformations in the early nineteenth century—such as bank failures, the Restriction Period, or the growing prevalence of paper money—are remembered, repressed, or refigured in the Victorian period. To what degree were Victorian financial practices and discourses predicated—or presumed to be predicated—on a response to an earlier history of marked by revolution and war? How are financial mechanisms and institutions implicated in understandings of individual and/or national identity? Papers may also address the shifting representation of specific financial "types," such as "homo economicus" or the "stock-jobber"; conceptions of financial crime and its perpetrator in law and literature; or the relationship between financial and literary authorship. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Sara Malton at sara.malton@smu.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should not exceed two pages (500 words) and should be submitted with a one page curriculum vitae by attachment or in the body of an email by February 15, 2006.
Nature and Narrative around 1800
John McCarthy, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Vanderbilt University
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The idea is to examine the nexus of scientific models of inquiry and literary, critical, or artistic production in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Narratives of all kinds, as well as book reviews/ essays/ extended correspondence on exploration, anthropology, technological inventions, physics, etc. can serve as sources for elucidating aesthetic, philosophical and/or scientific theories of the era. The focus should be on critique and exploration of interactions at the frontiers of knowledge and disciplines, at the meeting point between the world of ideas of the realm of natural forces. Of particular interest are studies that seek to assess how models of scientific inquiry and those of a literary and cultural nature share common ground. Here one might think of Friedrich Schlegel's exhortation to pursue a "Symphilosophie" that draws on the various branches of inquiry, of Goethe's knowledge of chemistry and the structure of his Elective Affinities, the significance of the theory of gravity for Schiller's aesthetic theory, techne in Shelly's Frankenstein and E.T.A. Hoffmann's tales as well as virtual reality in S.L. Mercier's futuristic 'L'An deux mille quatre cent quarante, rêve s'il en fut jamais' to name just a few possibilities. Submit to this special session by e-mailing John McCarthy at john.a.mccarthy@vanderbilt.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should not exceed two pages (500 words) and should be submitted with a one page curriculum vitae by attachment or in the body of an email by February 15, 2006.
Women Writers in German Romanticism
Monica Nenon, Associate Professor of German, University of Memphis
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Papers are invited on topics dealing with the role of women writers in German Romanticism. Examples of such topics might include genre and gender, conditions of the literary public sphere with regard to women, the salon, epistolary culture, or questions concerning subjectivity, to name just a few. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Monika Nenon at mcnenon@memphis.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
Aesthetics and Science
Tilottama Rajan, Canada Research Chair, English and Centre for Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario
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This panel seeks papers on connections and homologies between epistemic shifts in aesthetics, literature, and the sciences, particularly the life sciences, earth sciences, archeology and chemistry. Papers on European as well as British thought and philosophy are welcome. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Tilottama Rajan at trajan@sympatico.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be
submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format
by February 15, 2006.
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Difference and identity in the nineteenth century
Maurice Samuels , Assistant Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania
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This panel explores how ethnic/racial/religious minorities viewed themselves and were viewed by the larger culture in the nineteenth century. What factors shaped the construction of difference in various national contexts? How did literary and artistic representation participate in these constructions? What is the relation between ethnic/racial/religious identity and modernity? Between minority identity and nationalism? Papers should engage both the historical factors underlying cultural constructions as well as recent theoretical debates on identity, race, etc. Papers that examine various kinds of discourse (political pamphlets, journalism, social theory, etc. as well as literature and the visual arts) and that compare minority identity in different national contexts are welcome. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Maurice Samuels at samuelsm@sas.upenn.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words), with a one page curriculum vitae, and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as a Word attachment by February 15, 2006 .
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This special session invites consideration of the interplay between nineteenth-century evolutionary theory and conceptualizations of time. Historians of science have amply documented the role of the vast temporal spans posited by geological "deep time" in making thinkable a natural selection that gives rise to dramatic changes in organisms merely by slowly accumulating minute variations. Did other accounts of time (its extent, directionality, accessibility to observation or measurement, etc.) prove similarly epistemologically enabling--or, on the contrary, pose dificulties for theorizing the transmutation of species? More interesting still, perhaps, is the question of the temporalities that evolution opened up or made newly pertinent. Rudiments, recapitulation, perfection, regression, saltation, accumulation, extinction: many of the key terms of the debate within Victorian biological circles centered on issues of time and timing, and the specifically temporal implications of evolutionary theory were arguably those taken up with the most passion, anxiety, and intellectual excitement by thinkers who sought to bring that theory to bear on matters literary, political, or anthropological. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Cannon Schmitt at cschmitt@wayne.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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The purpose of the panel is to explore ways that translation has affected
and continues to affect the production and dissemination of Romanticism.
The problems of translation--denotation versus connotation;
word-for-word versus sense-for-sense; cultural differences; ideological
implications, to name a few--have become so commonplace that we tend
to overlook the real impact translation has on both the creation and
exchange of knowledge. Therefore, the Conference topics--techne and
scientia--provide two prisms through which the subject of translation
might be defamiliarized. From the perspective of "techne," papers
can focus on the craft of translation, as it was defined
contemporaneously in the Romantic Period, or as its evolution has
affected the production of Romantic texts for various cultures.
Similarly, papers concentrating on "scientia" can examine the
ways knowledge has been, and continues to be, affected by the act of
translation, whether in relation to particular texts or to cultural
interchange. Possible topics may include but are not limited to: The Craft of Translation in the
Romantic Period; The Effect of New Translation Techniques on the Reading
of Romantic Texts; The Kinds/Range of Translated Texts;
Cross-Romanticisms through Translation; Influences of Other Cultures on
Romanticism in General, or Specific Writers in Particular; Influences of
Romanticism on Other Cultures or on Specific Writers. Submit to this
special session by e-mailing Sheila Spector atsspec46166@aol.com and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper.
Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum
vitae, and should be submitted electronically in the body of an e-mail
or as an attachment in .wpd, .doc, or .rtf. by February 15, 2005.
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Construing "science" broadly as systematic knowledge, this
panel will ask how Romantic-era sciences constructed ideals
of personal cultivation and national culture. How did
political economists or philologists, for instance, imagine
national culture? How did physicians' models of the human
body shape models of personal cultivation? How are the
skeptical methods of natural philosophy related to cultivated
manners? Submit to this special session by e-mailing Ted
Underwood at tunder@uiuc.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages
(500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be
submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an
attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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The Art and Science of Acting
Edward Ziter, Associate Professor of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
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This panel examines acting theory in the romantic period. Despite a presumed antitheatrical prejudice and a preference for the visionary over the visible, early-nineteenth-century popular writers and cannonical essayists energetically debated the nature of excellent acting. These writings alternately described acting as an art, a craft, and a science; actors were praised or pilloried for their delineation of customs and manners and strategies of racial representation and terms such as "imitation" and "abstraction" were given considerable attention in the writing of Hazlitt and Coleridge and in the memoirs of actors such as Sarah Siddons. To what extent can a romantic ethos be discerned in such writings? Submit to this special session by e-mailing Edward Ziter at ted.ziter@nyu.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
NAVSA SPECIAL SESSIONS
Click here for NASSR Special Sessions
Special Sessions are open-call sessions vetted by individual scholars; all papers not accepted to the special sessions will be given a second evaluation by the general conference committee. If you wish to be considered for a special session, please send your proposal directly to the following e-mail addresses.
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culture wars and identity in french third republic education
Gilbert Chaitin , Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature, Indiana U
By making national identity a State affair, and in undermining Catholic teachings, the Ferry laws of 1880-1882 mandating national educational reform stirred up an existential angst among the entire population that previously had been reserved for the intellectual minority, while at the same time making both education and identity political matters. This attempt to reshape the identity of an entire nation naturally met with widespread resistance and counterattacks. Thus the culture wars of the Third Republic were launched. Papers are invited on the role of any aspect of education in defining the polemics of republicans, Catholics, nationalists and socialists that split the country into the "two Frances" and motivated calls for national identity and unity. Submit to this special session by emailing Gilbert Chaitin at chaitin@indiana.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be no longer than 2 pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae, and should be submitted electronically in the body of the email, or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format, by February 15, 2006.
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Reading and the Victorian Neural Sciences
Nicholas Dames, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia U
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The purpose of this panel is to investigate the connection between mind and world as it was understood by Victorian neural sciences, using one particular (and crucial) site of analysis: reading. How did the Victorian neural sciences—physiology, associationist psychology, psychophysics, phrenology, evolutionary theory—explain the cognitive or affective aspects of the reading act? How might other cultural facts, such as book or print design, advertising, libraries and reading groups, periodical reviewing and literary criticism, or even literary form, have evolved to reflect new knowledges of readerly cognition? Submit to this special session by emailing Nicholas Dames at nd122@columbia.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be no longer than 2 pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae, and should be submitted electronically in the body of the email, or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format, by February 15, 2006.
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Crises and their Religious Consequences
Carol Engelhardt, Associate Professor of History, Wright State U
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In the long 19 th century, English culture was, on the public level and in private, a broadly religious culture, yet too often religion is studied in isolation from secular culture. This panel seeks to collapse this distinction by exploring how moments of domestic and international crises affected religious beliefs, doctrines, practices, and even ecclesiastical appointments. These formative moments include but are not limited to major events such as the Peterloo Massacre, the potato famine in Ireland, the Indian Mutiny, and the Boer War; a local crisis or disturbance such as those occasioned by the Luddites or Chartists might also have had religious repercussions. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Carol Engelhardt at carol.engelhardt@wright.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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Artistic Circulation: The Social Lives of Victorian Paintings
Pamela M Fletcher, Assistant Professor of Art History, Bowdoin College
Becoming popular subjects for topical gossip at the Royal Academy, sent on extensive tours of the provinces and colonies, exhibited in department stores and in music halls, and reproduced in engravings, newspaper illustrations, advertisements, and tableaux vivants, Victorian paintings circulated through an astonishing variety of physical spaces, social networks, and media. By attending to the mobility and hybridity of Victorian imagery, this session aims to complicate our understanding of the functions and pleasures of the visual in Victorian culture. Papers might address the changing interpretations and evaluations of individual images in different venues or media, the translation process from one medium to another, or the multiple publics that images addressed. Papers that focus on individual works of art are welcome, as are examinations of particular venues, forms, and audiences. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Pamela M. Fletcher at pfletche@bowdoin.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006
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Papers should address the perils and/or pleasures of interdisciplinarity in dealing with the body during the long nineteenth century. Possible topics include but are not limited to the following: the intersection of the history of medicine and literary studies; the status of the body as an object of study in present scholarship; the social body; sexualities and the law; disease, mortality, reproduction and economics; the colonial or colonized body; race, ethnicity and nation; the concept of the corpus. Submit to this special session by emailing Pamela Gilbert at pgilbert@clas.ufl.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be no longer than 2 pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae, and should be submitted electronically in the body of the email, or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format, by February 15, 2006.
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Victorian Internationalisms
Lauren Goodlad, Associate Professor of English, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Victorianists have begun to recognize literary texts and other nineteenth-century cultural materials as sites of transnational encounter. Scholars of the period have moved beyond the limitations of a strictly "British" framework to consider the various border-crossing dynamics of empire, trade, and diaspora. Papers for this panel may wish to extend, engage with, and/or reflect on such approaches to Victorian Studies. They may wish to locate internationalism and/or cosmopolitanism as distinctly nineteenth-century (or Victorian) conceptions. Do historical and specifically literary understandings of the national, international, and cosmopolitan have anything to contribute to today's ruminations on, for example, postnationality, transnational citizenship, and globalization? Submit to this special session by e-mailing Lauren Goodlad at lgoodlad@uiuc.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006 .
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Papers are invited that explore romantic visuality between Burke's aesthetics and the rise of photography. Focal topics include but are not limited to Blake's plates; hypotyposis as the figure of romantic visuality (esp. Coleridge, Rodolphe Gasche on Kant in The Idea of Form); poetry and photography; the romantic image as snapshot; the verbal icon and/in emergent visual culture; Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian writers; photography and the Pre-Raphaelites; camera obscuras. Submit to this special session by e-mailing A. C. Goodson at goodson@msu.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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From Peacock to Sokal and Back: 19th-Century Culture Wars Revisited
Jens M. Gurr , Privatdozent of English, Duisburg-Essen U
Ten years after the Sokal affair, it may be worthwile to revisit 19th-century debates on literature and science and their respective roles in education from a specifically 21st-century perspective. What is the role of literature and of the humanities in education, within the university, in the modern world in general? This session aims to bring together papers taking a fresh look at Peacock and Shelley on poetry and science, Cardinal Newman on the university, Huxley and Arnold on literature, science and education or other famous or forgotten controversies and interventions on the subject in the 19th century. Without being too apologetic about our fields, a look at these texts and debates may well be of interest at a time when the "utility" of what we do is questioned in ways not radically different from those in the early 19th century. A wide variety of approaches is welcome so long as papers about the debate in some sense "make it new". Submit to this special session by e-mailing Jens M. Gurr at jens.gurr@uni-due.de and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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AGAINST TECHNOLOGY: GENERAL LUDD, CAPTAIN SWING, AND THEIR LEGACIES
Steven Jones , Professor of English, Loyola U of Chicago
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This session will focus on the history and cultural legacy of machine-wrecking and rick-burning protests of the early nineteenth century, from Luddism (1811-1816) to the "Swing Riots" of the 1830s and beyond. Papers may address either these specific historical movements (and labor subcultures) or their representations, echoes, and appropriations in romantic, Victorian and modern anti-industrial and anti-technology protests or cultural productions, whether in European, American, or global contexts. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Steven Jones at sjones1@luc.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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Exploration and Epistemology
Dane Kennedy , Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs , George Washington U
This panel will focus on the Victorian endeavor to establish exploration as a scientific enterprise. Among the many subjects that might be addressed in the panel are the epistemological and institutional foundations of scientific exploration, the establishment of protocols of measurement and observation, the implications for local informants and ethnographic practices, and the tensions between theory and practice in the field. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Dane Kennedy at dkennedy@gwu.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be no longer than 2 pages (500 words) and should be submitted with a one page curriculum vitae by email either as an attachment or included in the body of the message by February 15, 2006.
Recountings: Romantic and Victorian Finance
Sara Malton , Assistant Professor of English, Saint Mary's University
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This panel will focus on the varying risks and rewards of financial practices as they emerge in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Especially welcome are papers that consider how financial disruptions, controversies, or transformations in the early nineteenth century—such as bank failures, the Restriction Period, or the growing prevalence of paper money—are remembered, repressed, or refigured in the Victorian period. To what degree were Victorian financial practices and discourses predicated—or presumed to be predicated—on a response to an earlier history of marked by revolution and war? How are financial mechanisms and institutions implicated in understandings of individual and/or national identity? Papers may also address the shifting representation of specific financial "types," such as "homo economicus" or the "stock-jobber"; conceptions of financial crime and its perpetrator in law and literature; or the relationship between financial and literary authorship. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Sara Malton at sara.malton@smu.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should not exceed two pages (500 words) and should be submitted with a one page curriculum vitae by attachment or in the body of an email by February 15, 2006.
The aim of this special session is to explore the relationship between contemporary trauma theory and Victorian studies. Particularly welcome are papers that offer interventions in current conceptions of the genealogy of trauma and consider the implications of a more widely historicized conception of trauma, as well as papers that reflect on the usefulness and applicability of trauma theory to Victorian literature. Proposals may also address the relationship between Victorian literary representation and emergent psychological discourses of consciousness and its aberrations, the effect of affect on cognition, the functions and dysfunctions of memory, Victorian theories of dream, nightmare, and hallucination. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Jill Matus at jmatus@chass.utoronto.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be no longer than 2 pages (500 words) and should be submitted with a one page curriculum vitae by email either as an attachment or included in the body of the message by February 15, 2006.
Beyond Theatricality
Renata Kobetts Miller, Assistant Professor of English, The City College of the City University of New York
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Considered a low point in the history of the English stage by both theater historians and nineteenth-century audiences, Victorian theater remains a neglected field of study. Although scholars have begun to recognize on the theater's prominence in Victorian society and culture, much of this attention has actually been directed toward theatricality and the figure of theater. This panel will focus on Victorian theater itself as a cultural form that actively interacted with or influenced other cultural forms, including poetry, non-fiction prose, the novel, visual arts, and music. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Renata Kobetts Miller at remiller@ccny.cuny.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
Aesthetics and Science
Tilottama Rajan, Canada Research Chair, English and Centre for Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario
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This panel seeks papers on connections and homologies between epistemic shifts in aesthetics, literature, and the sciences, particularly the life sciences, earth sciences, archeology and chemistry. Papers on European as well as British thought and philosophy are welcome. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Tilottama Rajan at trajan@sympatico.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper.
Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be
submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format
by February 15, 2006.
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Imperial Things, Victorian Empires and the Global Consumer
Erika Rappaport, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
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This panel explores new paradigms for studying the relationship between imperialism and consumerism in the Victorian era. Many recent studies have shown how popular culture, especially visual culture, produced imperial and racial knowledge and stimulated a taste for imperial expansion. This panel seeks to complicate this model by considering the ways in which objects constituted specific scientific, political, economic and intellectual developments in imperial relationships and identities. Papers might also examine how empires were imagined as encounters between producers and consumers. They might also question to what extent models for transnational history based on geography, such as the Atlantic World or the Indian Ocean, are appropriate for the study of nineteenth-century imperial consumption. Papers should thus bring an imperial dimension to the study of consumer culture either from the perspective of the metropole, the colonies, or the spaces in between and beyond. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Erika Rappaport at rappaport@history.ucsb.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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Victorian symptoms
Matthew Rowlinson , Associate Professor of English and the Centre for Theory and Criticism, U of Western Ontario
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Among the possibilities envisioned for this session are papers on the representation and diagnosis of symptoms in Victorian science and/or in the broader culture of the period; papers in which post-Victorian (Marxist or psychoanalytic) concepts of the symptom are critically applied to Victorian topics; and papers investigating specifically Victorian symptom-formations. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Matthew Rowlinson at mrowlins@uwo.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
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Difference and identity in the nineteenth century
Maurice Samuels , Assistant Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania
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This panel explores how ethnic/racial/religious minorities viewed themselves and were viewed by the larger culture in the nineteenth century. What factors shaped the construction of difference in various national contexts? How did literary and artistic representation participate in these constructions? What is the relation between ethnic/racial/religious identity and modernity? Between minority identity and nationalism? Papers should engage both the historical factors underlying cultural constructions as well as recent theoretical debates on identity, race, etc. Papers that examine various kinds of discourse (political pamphlets, journalism, social theory, etc. as well as literature and the visual arts) and that compare minority identity in different national contexts are welcome. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Maurice Samuels at samuelsm@sas.upenn.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words), with a one page curriculum vitae, and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as a Word attachment by February 15, 2006 .
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This special session invites consideration of the interplay between nineteenth-century evolutionary theory and conceptualizations of time. Historians of science have amply documented the role of the vast temporal spans posited by geological "deep time" in making thinkable a natural selection that gives rise to dramatic changes in organisms merely by slowly accumulating minute variations. Did other accounts of time (its extent, directionality, accessibility to observation or measurement, etc.) prove similarly epistemologically enabling--or, on the contrary, pose dificulties for theorizing the transmutation of species? More interesting still, perhaps, is the question of the temporalities that evolution opened up or made newly pertinent. Rudiments, recapitulation, perfection, regression, saltation, accumulation, extinction: many of the key terms of the debate within Victorian biological circles centered on issues of time and timing, and the specifically temporal implications of evolutionary theory were arguably those taken up with the most passion, anxiety, and intellectual excitement by thinkers who sought to bring that theory to bear on matters literary, political, or anthropological. Submit to this special session by e-mailing Cannon Schmitt at cschmitt@wayne.edu and cc'ing the conference committee at navsa06@purdue.edu. Please indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be two pages (500 words) with a one-page curriculum vitae and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by February 15, 2006.
