See below for individual panel CFPs. To post your own and/or seek collaborators for organizing panels, email Communications Committee Chair, Travis Foster.
-----
​
Gen Z & C19: Affirming Student Scholars
Having come of age in an era of manifold interrelated political, economic, climatological, and public health crises, Gen Z brings cohort-specific expertise that can shed new light on our period of study. While the long nineteenth century saw the defining of American identity primarily through processes of exclusion, Gen Z seems to have coalesced around inclusive identity formation. Where both long nineteenth-century settler colonial and Indigenous epistemologies attached diverse forms of value to the land and resources of the Americas, this generation has inherited a rapidly changing planet that has forced them to confront the natural world’s precarity and their place within it. And just as nineteenth-century social movements harnessed the power of expanding periodical and performance cultures, young people today are inundated with new media and adept at mobilizing it to political ends.
We seek presenters for a proposed roundtable on pedagogical approaches and classroom practices that affirm the insights undergraduate students bring to the study of nineteenth century America. Presentations might address how C19 scholar-teachers facilitate, support, and amplify student scholarship through course design or research relationships. We especially encourage submissions authored in collaboration with students or that feature student voices.
Please send a 250-word abstract to Sam Sommers at s.sommers@uconn.edu and Jess Libow at jlibow@haverford.edu by August 1, 2023.
​
-----
​
“The End” in Historical Fiction of and about the Long Nineteenth Century
​
Elodie Rousselot defines “neo-historical fiction” as a subgenre of historical fiction that reimagines history by offering an “active interrogation of the past.”1 Historical fiction, broadly speaking, allows readers to witness perspectives of the recognizable past while audiences interrogate the future. Most importantly, imagining the livelihood or end of various societal institutions has different stakes for different groups. Perspective is critical in historical fiction as exploring significant historical events also offers the opportunity to actively interrogate the future. The long nineteenth century serves as an extended period through which to explore the ends and futures of significant society-shaping moments from various perspectives, especially considering its plethora of historical events in the U.S. and abroad that continue to shape our present, such as enslavement, abolition, forced displacement, the Industrial Revolution, and a host of wars, to name a few.
This proposed roundtable seeks papers for the upcoming C19 Conference, to be held on March 14-16, 2024, in Pasadena, CA, that explore representations of “the end” and interrogations of “the future” in historical fiction of or about the long nineteenth century. Papers that analyze these “ends” and “futures” from marginalized communities’ perspectives are especially encouraged. Please email abstracts of 250 words and a brief bio to DeLisa D. Hawkes (dhawkes2@utk.edu) by August 1, 2023.
​
-----
​
“Will you finish your story?”: Trans Studies and Julia Ward Howe’s “Laurence” 20 Years Later
​
Panel Organizers: Eagan Dean (Rutgers New Brunswick) and Kadin Henningsen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
​
Respondent: Dr. Karen Sánchez-Eppler (Amherst College)
​
This panel marks the 20th anniversary of the print publication of Julia Ward Howe’s famously unended “Laurence” novel as The Hermaphrodite (2004). Since then, trans and intersex studies have provided new insights, theories, and methods for revisiting Howe’s novel. We seek panelists for a proposed session that uses the novel and its anniversary as a springboard. We invite trans and/or intersex studies approaches to exploring the unfinished nature of Howe’s
“Laurence” manuscript and other texts, including papers that engage with the materiality of Howe’s “Laurence” manuscript and its later embodiment in print, topics in scholarly editing, and trans/queer, incomplete, or otherwise unruly texts.
​
Please send a 200-word abstract and short bio to the panel organizers at e.dean@rutgers.edu and kjh3@illinois.edu by August 1, 2023.
​
-----
​
The End of the Line
Rather than consider how poetry in America’s long nineteenth century might thematize or imagine endings (Millenialist or otherwise), this proposed panel investigates how their forms enact them. Much as Neil Hertz’s book on psychoanalysis (from which we take our title) sought to explore the limits of the sublime as a mode of understanding, this panel also considers the degree to which line endings might reveal historical, conceptual or formal insight. Considering recent work in historical poetics, new formalism and new historicism, our proposed panel invites papers that explore particular poem or line endings and their entanglements with larger cultural and political contexts. Given that Emily Dickinson writes the majority of her poems during the 1859-65 period and given poetry’s importance to anti-slavery movements writ large, we invite papers that either work from her poems as a point of departure or work comparatively between Dickinson and other poets of the long nineteenth century, such as Phillis Wheatley Peters, Walt Whitman, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, and George Moses Horton, to name a few possibilities. We are particularly interested in how poetic form works both with and against Millienalist imaginaries.
Please send a 250-word abstract and brief bio to Elizabeth Petrino at epetrino@fairfield.edu and Wendy Tronrud at Wendy.Tronrud@qc.cuny.edu by August 15th.
​
-----
​
Trans Childhoods
​
We are seeking two additional papers for a panel on trans childhoods at the 2024 C19 conference in Pasadena. If you’re interested, please send a couple of sentences about your research to Travis Foster (travis.foster@villanova.edu) and Sarah Sillin (sarah.sillin@swu.edu) by August 1st.
​
-----
​
Loose Ends
​
What are loose ends? How do loose ends come about? What do scholars do with loose ends? Loose ends can appear disconnected, undecided, unattached, unguarded. They can be unsettled or unexplained details, things that have been overlooked or postponed. Loose ends frequently appear on the edges, out of joint; they may be excessive yet also a sign of incompleteness. As scholars, we typically aim to “tie up loose ends,” to explain what is ambiguous, to tighten the argument, to finish a thought. Sometimes we cut loose ends off entirely. But what happens when we leave loose ends as they are, and let them guide us in loosening the hold of a teleological “end” or a monolithic arrangement? Thinking with “loose ends” invites us to linger on the finitude of singularities: an anomalous gesture or stray word can become the thread that unravels the fabric of received understanding.
Loose ends carry particular significance for nineteenth century American literatures. Within the fibrillous inlets of the Chesapeake Bay, Frederick Douglass observes “the moving multitude of ships…loosed from your moorings,” and registers slackened cables as guides towards freedom. Launching his verse, Walt Whitman beseeches readers to “loose the stop from your throat,” encouraging all modes of unfastened loafing and leaning. Literatures of this period are filled with writers and characters who might be considered loose cannons with loose tongues; those who are on the loose, as well as those who play “fast and loose” and live with so-called “loose morals.” “Loose ends” might further encourage us to pause over established conversations, terms, or frameworks of this period and field, to engage unresolved issues, or return to ways of thinking that are not currently at the forefront of academic discussions.
We seek presenters for a proposed roundtable on “loose ends.” We leave the topic of “loose ends” up to loose interpretations and loose associations, and offer “looseness” as a way of thinking through “the End” as well as other “ends.”
Please send abstracts of approximately 300 words to Katrina Dzyak (kmd2207@columbia.edu) and Benjamin Hulett (bnh2130@columbia.edu) by August 14th, 2023.
​
-----
​
“The End of the Human(ities)”
In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois explained that the problem of the color line was a problem of (meta)physical and educational implications for those who “still seek, the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think.” Du Bois’s “freedom” connected the liberation of the body, soul, and mind—the desire to live and learn unbounded—to the human. He introduced a quandary still relevant today: To think and be human is to think about how to study life through the “humanities.”
Scholars of the long nineteenth century like Anna Julia Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Du Bois, and others understood the potential and limitations of the humanities and the human regarding racial uplift and solidarity. However, today, between Black Lives Matter and abolitionist movements, the race to end Critical Race Theory, the end of the English major, Afropessimism, and more, many question if we are or should be at the end of the humanities and the human.
We invite papers that consider what happens at the end of the human(ities). Are we at the end of the human(ities), and if not, how can we think of the human(ities) differently—alternatively? What comes after the fall of the human(ities)? Can the human(ities) still attend to ways of being human external to Westernized frameworks? With the revival of nineteenth-century popular terms and movements such as abolition, how do we read these recurring afterlives? Topics can interrogate the human/humanities through institutional, disciplinary, ontological, political, spatial, etcetera lens and debates that resonated in the nineteenth century but also are significant for the current moment. We especially welcome papers highlighting Black and other underrepresented voices, theories, and texts.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief bio by August 11th to Courtney Murray at cxm2274@psu.edu and Kirsten Lee at leekir@sas.upenn.edu.
-----
​
Never Say Die: Secular and Heterodox Immortalities in the Long 19C
Meghan O’Gieblyn, reflecting in a recent n+1 essay on the lure of transhumanism’s promise to overcome mortality through better technology, reads Silicon Valley’s embrace of “an endless ladder of upgrades and solutions” as a secularization of the Christian faith in resurrection. Tracking what seems like a contrary trend, Tara Isabella Burton in The New Atlantis describes how formerly rationalist online communities have lately morphed into a “metatribe” dedicated to (among other things) celebrating the solstice and practicing Tarot, signaling a “postrationalist turn” that aims for “self-transcendence” by means of curated primitivism. Both techno-fixing and resacralizing, however opposed in their rhetoric and style, ultimately aim to challenge if not overcome the material limits on human life. No wonder: between climate change and artificial intelligence, the end of existence (personally, collectively) can feel nearer than ever.
But envisioning the beginning that follows the end is an entrenched and popular habit in US culture. Figures as divergent as Nat Turner and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps make the case for versions of resurrection that stray from traditional Christian doctrine. This panel seeks papers that explore the long nineteenth century for evidence of the competition to reinvent eternal life in secular or heterodox ways. Examples might include technological solutions, like Andrew Jackson Davis’s vision of telegraph lines connecting the living to the dead; literary responses, like Emily Dickinson’s poems dramatizing the post-mortem consciousness; non-Christian religious answers, like the obeah practices that Toni Wall Jaudon and other scholars have written about. We welcome, too, comparisons and contrasts between these nineteenth-century visions of everlasting life with those offered in contemporary culture. The goal is to gather papers that will offer a varied portrait of nineteenth-century responses to the threat of mortality that are self-consciously modern, reformist, or progressive, by whatever definition.
Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief biography to Ashley Barnes (ashley.barnes@utdallas.edu) and Dawn Coleman (dcolema7@utk.edu) by Friday August 18.
​
-----
​
Endlessness
​
Writing about Henry David Thoreau’s Journal as a “workshop of being,” François Specq describes the massive text as developing “permanent discontinuity and asymmetry, arrhythmia and no repetition within repetition, as a celebration of uninterrupted creation, surging up, random, endless, inevitable.” The very task of daily journal-keeping assumes endlessness, at least until the end of one’s own life. Even then, the massive corpus contains the raw material for renewed interpretations and discoveries long after the final entry was penned. Beyond journal-keeping, Walt Whitman’s continuous revision of Leaves of Grass, Frederick Douglass’s and W. E. B. Du Bois’s multiple autobiographies, and countless unfinished works from multiple authors give the impression of the nineteenth century as littered with uncompleted, seemingly fragmented projects and texts.
This panel seeks perspectives on forms of “endlessness” in various modes: as a means of interpretation, a critique of progress, a political exercise, an ecological formulation, etc. Papers may consider different seemingly endless genres (the fragment, the cliffhanging novel); the theme of endlessness in political, philosophical, and scientific discourse; the affect of endlessness; interpretation and critique as an endless practice; anti-teleology; open-ended pedagogy; or other relevant themes.
​
Please submit a 250–300 word abstract along with a brief bio to thomas.howard@wustl.edu by August 15, 2023.
​
-----
​
Democratic Affects & Personalities
This proposed panel considers the embodied affects of democracy in the nineteenth century, reaching from inebriated voting to polite persuasion and everything in between. We invite papers that think through some combination of the following questions. How do embodied states of emotion relate to the practice, process, and ends of democracy in nineteenth-century America? What kinds of affects, personalities, and voices were attached to alternative forms of democratic thought that differed from “normative” political developments? Which emotional qualities were thought to exemplify—or revise, contradict, and expand—democratic process and representation? And what was their political “end”? We are interested in papers that consider democratic affect broadly construed and discuss unconventional political emotions that have not received full treatment in scholarly studies of the period.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a brief bio by August 15th to Daniel Couch at daniel.couch@afacademy.af.edu and Michelle Sizemore at michelle.sizemore@uky.edu
-----
​
The End of Animal Cruelty
When Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1866, he boldly proclaimed his organization’s mission to end “gross ignorance, thoughtlessness, indifference, and wanton cruelty to . . . brute creation.” Over 150 years later, the ASPCA and other organizations (like the Humane Society of the United States, for example) continue to fight against cruelty to animals. As historians have demonstrated, the years that followed the founding of the ASPCA saw animal welfare and humane education initiatives gain enormous influence across the United States. A crucial component of these initiatives’ work involved the circulation of literature that taught readers about the importance of kindness to animals while ultimately reinforcing a white liberal humanist vision of the “humane.” Such humane initiatives connect more broadly to environmental initiatives in our current moment of climate crisis as, for example, factory farms inflict cruelty on animals while simultaneously harming the environment. Despite the reach and influence of humane education initiatives in the nineteenth century, we thus continue to grapple with ending animal cruelty today. Why?
Given the historical origins of much current animal welfare work and definitions of the “humane,” the field of nineteenth-century Americanist studies is an especially promising site for addressing this question, as examining these origins in closer detail can allow us to better understand how and why certain cultural attitudes towards different species have persisted up to our current moment. In these eschatological times, the one “end” the nineteenth-century animal welfare movement was calling for is still being thwarted or passively resisted, and the end of humanity appears nearer than the advent of a humane-ity relieved of the noxious white liberal principles that have so far structured it. For this roundtable, we invite submissions that consider the importance of nineteenth-century Americanist studies in tracking the development of humane education and, by extension, in foregrounding the importance of the humanities at a time when the “humane” continues to circulate in our cultural lexicon. Indeed, increasingly the word “humane” is becoming a site of tension, challenge, and resistance, as it both resists and reinforces the end of certain conceptions of humanity. We seek papers from literary and historical perspectives that investigate these dimensions and that dwell on how such investigations might, hopefully, help us in creating a more just future for all beings.
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and a brief bio by Monday, August 14th to Karah Mitchell at karahm@live.unc.eduand Emma Thiébaut at emmathiebaut@outlook.fr.
​
-----
​
"New Beginnings in Harper Studies"--Proposed Roundtable
Utz Mcknight echoes the sentiments of Frances Foster and others in that the prolific writer, lecturer and Black feminist foremother Frances E.W. Harper was never ignored in the contemporary moment, but rather “diminished in importance” (Mcknight, xi). That diminishing has resonated into today, where Harper’s extensive body of writing, and the knowledge of her incredible career, is more needed than ever. There is a general consensus among the American populace that times since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic have been bleak, and given recent political and social upsets administered by state and federal governments, increasing economic strife and worsening strains on race relations, the times are perpetually getting worse. McKnight’s Frances Harper: A Call to Conscious (2021), intervenes in the scholarship of Harper Studies by conceptualizing ways to make the famed public intellectual available and accessible to a wider audience. By doing this, McKnight notes that it “provides a description of another America, a new society that we should aspire to become – one that acknowledges and understands the contribution of all members of the society to how we think of this nation”(xi).
Using McKnight’s assertion as a foundation and engaging the theme of "The End" by conceptualizing a way forward in or after the 'end times,' this roundtable will discuss reinvigorating Harper Studies through new, unique and even unlikely perspectives and modalities to further ignite fresh academic discourse, consider pedagogical evolutions and how reading Harper in modern, even popular contexts can inspire and encourage the wider public to partake in issues regarding community activism, mutual aid, intellectualism and abolition.
Topics can include but aren't limited to:
-Black feminist futures
-Digital and Public Humanities
-Mutual aid
-Community and stewardship
-Black joy/Afropessimsim
-Education and curriculum
-Activism
-Postmodernism and popular readings
Those interested are asked to submit an abstract of no more than 200-300 words and a brief bio of no more than 100 words. Please submit via email at myw8198@nyu.edu by Aug. 1st, 2023. Papers will be brief (5 min. max), but please specify if you need A/V needs. The majority of the session will be devoted to discussion.
​
-----
Loose Ends
​
What are loose ends? How do loose ends come about? What do scholars do with loose ends? Loose ends can appear disconnected, undecided, unattached, unguarded. They can be unsettled or unexplained details, things that have been overlooked or postponed. Loose ends frequently appear on the edges, out of joint; they may be excessive yet also a sign of incompleteness. As scholars, we typically aim to “tie up loose ends,” to explain what is ambiguous, to tighten the argument, to finish a thought. Sometimes we cut loose ends off entirely. But what happens when we leave loose ends as they are, and let them guide us in loosening the hold of a teleological “end” or a monolithic arrangement? Thinking with “loose ends” invites us to linger on the finitude of singularities: an anomalous gesture or stray word can become the thread that unravels the fabric of received understanding.
Loose ends carry particular significance for nineteenth century American literatures. Along the fibrillous inlets of the Chesapeake Bay, Frederick Douglass observes “the moving multitude of ships…loosed from your moorings,” and registers slackened cables as guides towards freedom. Launching his verse, Walt Whitman beseeches readers to “loose the stop from your throat,” encouraging all modes of unfastened loafing and leaning. Literature from this period involves writers and characters who might be considered loose cannons with loose tongues; those who are on the loose, as well as those who play “fast and loose” and live with so-called “loose morals.” “Loose ends” might further encourage us to pause over established conversations, terms, or frameworks of this period and field, to engage unresolved issues, or return to ways of thinking that are not currently at the forefront of academic discussions.
We seek presenters for a proposed roundtable on “loose ends.” We leave the topic of “loose ends” up to loose interpretations and loose associations, and offer “looseness” as a way of thinking through “the End” as well as other “ends.”
Please send abstracts of approximately 300 words to Katrina Dzyak (kmd2207@columbia.edu) and Benjamin Hulett (bnh2130@columbia.edu) by August 14th, 2023.
​
-----
​
Black Writing Networks
The organizers (Faith Barrett, Duquesne University; April Logan, Salisbury University; and Elissa Zellinger, Texas Tech University) seek proposals of 250-300 words as well as a 250-300 word biographical note, describing the scholarly work of potential panelists. Proposals from graduate students are especially welcome.
This proposed panel will examine how Black writers across the United States relied on writing and reading networks to shape their rhetorical and/or aesthetic strategies and to build a range of audiences for their work. Papers will discuss the ways Black writers across the nineteenth century used communities to facilitate their entrance into print culture and to increase the visibility and influence of Black print culture. Proposals should address this topic and possibly some of the following questions: In what ways are these writing and reading communities shaped by the work of Black church and educational networks as well as Black benevolent societies and political organizations? When and how do Black writers use their networks to respond to the rhetoric of Protestant millenialism, with its focus on the US as God's chosen nation? How do Black writers respond to writing and/or reading networks situated outside the US? And how do Black writers use their networks not only to call for abolition, but also to critique the limits of US citizenship and to call for greater civil or other rights for African Americans? Proposals are due to aclogan@salisbury.edu by Friday, August 18.
​
-----
​
“Means and Ends: 19th Century Authorship and the 21st Century Writing Classroom”
This panel seeks to consider how aspects of nineteenth-century authorship and literary production can complement, contribute to, or enhance the priorities and concerns of writing instruction in the contemporary classroom. We invite papers that explore the pedagogical implications of any dimension of nineteenth-century thought. Possible avenues of inquiry include: In what ways do nineteenth-century texts, authors, and conditions of textual production shed light on the role that writing plays in today’s university? How does Edgar Allan Poe’s idea that “Thought is logicalized by the effort at written expression” live on in today’s pedagogy? What vexed nineteenth-century notions of authority live on in today’s conception of writing as an instrument for success? What can we learn about original authorship, plagiarism, the politics of citation, theories of writing and writing’s relationship to reading by thinking with nineteenth-century writing?
Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a brief bio by August 18 to Rahcael DeWitt (r.dewitt@columbia.edu) and Ami Yoon (ami.yoon@baruch.cuny.edu).
​
-----
​
The End(s) of Originality?: The Transcendentalists and AI
In the July/August issue of The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance retells the story of Emerson’s 1833 visit to the Cabinet of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes, finding in it a parable for our time. “The flash of vision Emerson experienced in Paris was not a rejection of change but away of reimagining human potential as the world seemed to spin off its axis,” LaFrance says, adding that, “Emerson’s reaction to the technological renaissance of the 19th century is worth revisiting as we contemplate the great technological revolution of our own century: the rise of artificial superintelligence.”
This panel invites papers that consider how the Transcendentalists and thinkers they influenced may inform our understanding of artificial intelligence as the end of—or furthering the ends to—human creativity and originality. What perspectives do Emerson’s transcendentalist writings offer insofar as they theorize or model a kind of natural intelligence? What do essays such as “Self-Reliance,” “Circles,” “Intellect,” “The Poet,” or “Experience,” for example, say about human expression in terms of its originality, agency, and ethics? What epistemological or teleological questions do they pose for AI? How might the writings of other transcendentalists–both and white and Black, as Peter Wirzbicki describes them–underscore the value of intellectual production toward engineering social and political change? How do Transcendentalist utopian projects, from Brook Farm to Fruitlands and even Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond, inform our understanding about the meaning of labor and its relationship to ingenuity, contemplation, and creativity? How might feminist ways of thinking about creativity and/or collaborative practices contribute to this conversation?
Please send a 300-word abstract and a brief biography to Mark Gallagher (markgallagher@ucla.edu) by Monday, August 28th, 2023.
​
-----
​
William Wells Brown as a Man of Letters
​
William Wells Brown’s most taught and studied writings continue to be those like his autobiographical Narrative (1847), his novel Clotel (1853), and his play The Escape (1858) that helped mobilize a transatlantic, interracial alliance around the goal of abolishing U.S. slavery. Yet, we are not anywhere near the end of studying his many contributions to American culture and politics. Indeed, Brown’s literary and political careers extended well beyond the end of slavery. This panel will take a broad and comprehensive view of Brown as a preeminent man of nineteenth-century letters. Though the panel organizers (Joe Conway, University of Atlanta in Huntsville and April Logan, Salisbury University) are most interested in considerations of Brown’s less well-known writings and speeches, they also welcome papers that chart how Brown— an obsessive reviser of his own writing— adapted his more familiar antebellum work to fit the new historical, cultural, and social contexts of Civil War and Reconstruction.
Some topics may include, but are by no means contained by, the following:
- My Southern Home and the “afterlife of slavery”
- Brown’s histories and the Black Atlantic historiographical tradition, including DuBois’ Black Reconstruction and James’ Black Jacobins
- Brown’s development as a historian from The Black Man (1862) through The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867) and The Rising Son (1873)
- Brown’s engagement with 19th century feminisms and womanism and/or Black Feminist and/or Womnist engagement with Brown
- Humor as strategy over the course of Brown’s career
- Brown’s depiction of Black community and culture before and after the war
- Brown, the archive,and print culture (ex. Miralda’s 1860-1 publication in the Anglo-African; Clotelle’s 1864 publication in Redpath’s “Books for the Campfire Series”)
- Brown and the study of Empire
- Textual and contextual evolution from Clotel to Miralda to Clotelle
- Brown’s relationships or textual comparisons with Douglass, the Crafts, Garrison, and other veterans of the anti-slavery movement and their protégés, such as Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, or other literary figures
- Brown’s career as a temperance and/or peace advocate
- Brown and the Black Atlantic, including his travel narratives such as Three Years in Europe: or, Places I have Seen and People I have Met. (1852) and his late 1877 speaking tour through England and Scotland
The organizers seek proposals of 250-300 words as well as a C.V. describing the scholarly work of potential panelists. Proposals from graduate students are especially welcome. Please submit proposals to jpc0018@uah.edu by Friday, August, 18.
​
-----
​
Material Ends
​
We are looking for two additional participants for a C19 panel considering disintegration, material remains, and the ends of collecting and memorialization. Relevant papers might examine the survival of scientific collections, or how the construction of collections or taxonomies forecloses various possibilities; memorial sites like cemeteries, cabins, or historic sites; texts describing intended or unintended destruction; legal or extralegal moves to end religious or other embodied cultural practices; and theories of materiality, legacy, and “the end.”
We welcome papers examining catastrophic material outcomes as sites of rupture or loss and examinations of cultural products, laws, or movements meant to disappear by design. We’re also interested in the significance of materials that survive the purported end of an era, and in those actors who work to facilitate that survival.
If you’re interested, please send an abstract of around 250 words and a brief bio to Rebecca Rosen (rrosen1@murraystate.edu) and Julia Dauer (jdauer@saintmarys.edu) by August 15.
​
-----
​
Roundtable: Poetic Theory in the C19 US
Americanist critics have become accustomed to a radically foreshortened canon of poetic theory. Scholars generally restrict themselves to Emerson and Whitman when teaching (and writing) about how C19 Americans thought about the nature and cultural place of poetry, with occasional appearances by Poe, Dickinson, or Dunbar.
This roundtable is designed to provoke more adventurous thinking about the range of theories of poetry in the C19. We welcome proposals for short presentations (8-10 minutes) on a single text that illuminates some aspect of 19thC US poetics, for instance: a neglected nineteenth-century book about poetry; a book-chapter, periodical article, or review that takes up questions of poetic form, genre, or discourse; an individual poem that acts as a particularly insightful ars poetica; selections from correspondence ruminating on the nature or place of poetry; or a reprinted text that signifies differently in its American context. We hope to make the group of focal texts we assemble available to conference-goers ahead of time, so as to make the conversation as richly informed as possible.
Please send a cv and a short proposal (no more than 300 words) to Virginia Jackson (vwjackso@uci.edu) and Meredith McGill (mlmcgill@english.rutgers.edu) by August 11. If the volume of submissions warrants it, we would be happy to put together two roundtable sessions.
​
-----
​
"Refusing Foreclosures and Endings: 19C Women Writers' Defiance, Persistence, and Resilience"
The Margaret Fuller Society seeks to form a panel for the March 2024 C19 conference in Pasadena, CA. We invite abstracts of no more than 250 words that engage with Fuller and/or other 19C women writers (American and otherwise) as well as the conference theme—"The End." Papers might consider the following topics, among numerous possibilities:
-
untimely ends
-
refusing endings
-
playing with traditional narrative or poetic endings
-
various means to—or around—an end
-
reform efforts as well as their imperfections and limits
-
failed revolutions
-
critiques of “resilience,” as theorized and applied
-
finishing schools or crossing finish lines
-
finishing as orgasm
-
abortion, broadly conceived
-
ways around, through, or under seemingly insuperable barriers—including structural racism
-
ways in which this new generation of students and faculty are challenging us to change the ends or goals of American literature syllabi
Early career scholars are especially encouraged to apply. Please send proposals and questions to Christina Katopodis at katopodis.christina@gmail.com with “C19 Proposal” in the subject line by August 26.
​
-----
​
"Energy Humanities in the 19th Century”
This panel takes up Patricia Yaeger's question of what would happen if we “rechart literary periods and make energy sources a matter of urgency to literary criticism?”, for example, by muscle, paraffin, lamp oil, coal, wood, wind, and more. Through historically grounded energy-centered readings of nineteenth-century texts, can we identify themes of energy that help us understand forces that continue to shape, and occlude, discourses of energy in the US today? Papers may focus on representations and theorizing of energy, labor, extractive practices, etc., in nineteenth century fiction, poetry, and drama. How can we better see the complex array of energy, whether from enslaved people and expendable crew members, that fueled an expansionist, often blood-thirsty burgeoning empire?
Please send 250-word abstracts and short bio to Debby Rosenthal at drosenthal@jcu.edu by August 25th, 2023.
​
-----
​
“Race and Plasticity”
Scholars in the fields of new materialisms, affect studies, and contemporary theory have begun to explore the concept of plasticity as it relates to race, sex, gender, and other biopolitical categories of the human. While philosophers like Catherine Malabou have explicated this concept through 19th-century figures like Hegel and Darwin, scholars and theorists like Kyla Schuller and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson have made plasticity central to their investigations of the human as conceptualized in literary, scientific, and political works of the long 19th century. While scholarship on race in the nineteenth century has typically focused on the emergence of biological essentialism and rigid racial taxonomies, the newer focus on discourses of plasticity makes possible more nuanced histories of race concepts and practices as they developed in connection with other vectors of power and resistance. As such, the concept of plasticity is crucial to our intersectional understanding of race in the nineteenth century and its reverberations in 20th- and 21st-century theory and practice.
This proposed panel invites papers that consider the entanglements of race and plasticity in the long 19th century. Possible subjects might include:
· Race, animality, and evolution
· Childhood, temporality, and ethnicity
· Impressibility discourse and sentimentalism
· Historical and philosophical conceptions of the human
· Histories of physiology, neurology, psychology
· Slave narratives and neo-slave narratives
· Historical shifts in scientific understandings of race
· The malleability of body and/or mind
· Nation, population, biopolitics
Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a brief bio to Joshua Lam (jdlam@msu.edu) and M. Clay Hooper (mchooper@pvamu.edu) by August 21.
​
-----
​
We seek to compose a panel on foreclosed or forestalled textual ends in nineteenth century African American literature. We are interested in papers that discuss the challenges of writing about texts that were either revised or incomplete. We especially welcome presentations that consider how revised texts complicate scholarly editing projects. The relationship between revision and scholarly editing is particularly pressing for scholars of 19th century African American literature as the archival turn gives way to a bibliographical reckoning.
Panel co-organizers:
Sarah Robbins (Assistant Professor of English, Tufts)
Marina Bilbija (Assistant Professor of English, Wesleyan University)
Please submit an abstract of 200-250 words and a brief bio to Marina Bilbija mbilbija@wesleyan.edu and Sarah Robbins sarah.robbins@tufts.edu by August 21.
​
-----
​
Roundtable: C19 Americanists and Critical University Studies
This roundtable will convene several nineteenth-century Americanists who have been publishing, podcasting, and practicing public-facing and internally transformative critical university studies (CUS). Our conversation will start from considering this both broad and narrow prompt: What does our field (C19 studies) bring to bear on critical university studies, however you conceive of both (C19 and CUS)? We look forward to a robust conversation that extends into such topics as colleges’ and universities’ debts to Indigenous and enslaved people for the land and buildings they occupy; the relationship between diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA) and critical race studies (CRS) to CUS; organizing to gain better working conditions for graduate students and the professoriate, roles that our professional organizations can/must play in ameliorating our field and the profession; strategies for engaging and teaching the public, our students, and our own colleagues about the “value” of the humanities, C19, CRS, etc. in “end times”; pre-CUS critical studies of the university; persistent structures and practices of inequality in the field and profession; C19 Alt-ac (alternative academic training/careers) and CUS; and abolitionist university studies (AUS) in relation to the histories, theories, and practices of abolition in the nineteenth century U.S. and/or CUS. We hope that this roundtable will contribute to integrating CUS even more thoroughly into C19 as we continually interrogate both the possible ends and the end of our field, disciplines, and institutions.
As the roundtable is taking shape, we very much want to include someone working on abolitionist university studies, and ideally at the intersection of the abolition of slavery and abolitionist university studies, so that this important perspective is represented. Please send a brief (< 300 words) abstract to mdinius@depaul.edu by August 30.