Month: December 2019

Announcements, CFP

CFP NASSR 2020: “Visions”

Kirstyn Leuner

You are invited to submit a proposal for the 28th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). The NASSR conference, which will bring together 300-400 scholars to discuss literature, philosophy, art, and culture c. 1770-1840, will take place at the University of Toronto, Ontario on August 6-9, 2020.

The deadline for general submissions is 24 January 2020.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://sites.utoronto.ca/wincs/nassr2020

Keynote Speakers:
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University)
Martin Myrone (Tate Britain)

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Re-envisioning Romanticism: looking back and looking forward
  • Visions and the visionary: perception, prognostication, projection, speculation, the speculative
  • Ways of looking: reading, conceptualizing, observing, peeping, gazing, categorizing, examining, recognizing and misrecognizing
  • Visual culture, philosophy, and aesthetics: objects of sight, spectacle, the spectacular, the sublime and the beautiful
  • Reading methods and histories: careful, close, distant, surface; plagiarism, copyright law
  • Print culture in its social, theoretical, and physical aspects (e.g. text, design, structure, layout); manuscripts, letters, journals, scrapbooks, books, journals, newspapers
  • The seen and the unseen: noumena, phenomena, the spirit world, apparitions and appearances
  • Romantic iconoclasm and anti-representationalism; ocularcentrism and “the tyranny of the eye”
  • Visual communication: text, numbers, notation (e.g. musical), images, sign language, placards, banners, flags, gestures, hieroglyphs, emblems, insignia
  • Questions of form and representation
  • Fashionable looking: costume, hair, makeup, manner, style, taste, places to see and be seen
  • Visualizing gender and sexuality: identity, performance, politics
  • Visual and scenic arts: sculpture, painting, illustration, graphic satire, print shops, pornography, broadsheets, dioramas, panoramas, architectural and landscape design
  • Theatre and performing arts: set design, lighting, visual effects, costume, body movement, dance, pantomime, attitudes, tableaux vivants
  • Art collection and assessment: museums and curation, connoisseurship, formal and evaluative concerns (e.g. light, color, pattern, shape, scale, proportion)
  • Visualizing class: social hierarchies and signifiers (e.g. clothing, heraldry, pageantry), occupational and economic segregation
  • Instruments of looking: lenses, spectacles, quizzing glasses, spy glasses, Claude glasses, prisms, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, orreries, windows
  • Forms of illumination and darkness: lightning, electricity, candlelight, lamps, gas light, spotlights, limelight, torches, fireworks; shade, shadow, twilight, gloom, obscurity
  • Religious vision(s): prophecy, revelation, enthusiasm, sermons and hymns, public and private devotion, natural and revealed religion
  • The science of the eye: vision, optics, visual anatomy, medicine, pathology, disability, blindness
  • Data visualization (e.g. land, economy, population studies): mapping, cartography, geography, geolocation, charts, diagrams, categorization, numerical and pictorial statistics
  • Visualizing race: slavery, racism, racialization, minoritization
  • Vision and ecopoetics: seeing nature (vistas, prospects, the picturesque); noticing and reading features of land, water, and sky; watching weather and recognizing climate; the animal gaze
  • Envisioning space and place: the local and the global, home and abroad, the peripheral and transperipheral
  • Envisioning (the ends of) empire: imperialism, colonialism, sites and sights of war; decolonization, indigenization
  • Political and military forecasting, strategy, optics, campaigns, battlegrounds, political theatre
  • Imagining the future of Romanticism; strategizing its work in the humanities, in the university, and in society

EMAIL CONTACT: nassr2020vision@gmail.com

NASSR2020Poster

Announcements, CFP

Love Among the Poets: The Victorian Poetics of Intimacy (Proposed Volume)

Kirstyn Leuner

Love Among the Poets: The Victorian Poetics of Intimacy

Proposed volume of essays, edited by
Pearl Chaozon Bauer (Notre Dame de Namur University)
Erik Gray (Columbia University)

“Victorian poetry,” as Isobel Armstrong observes, “is unparalleled in its preoccupation with…what it is to love.” For this collection, we are seeking essays that explore the connection between poetry—especially lyric poetry—and the experience of love or intimacy. Some questions that contributors might address (though we welcome all approaches and ideas): How is intimacy represented, or created, by the forms, rhythms, and genres of Victorian poetry? What resources does poetry offer for expressing forms of love that fall outside the traditional marriage plot of the Victorian novel? How did love poetry circulate in the Victorian era? How does it relate to other forms of Victorian art and culture? We are looking for essays that consider a wide variety of intimate relationships: not just sexual or erotic love, but friendship, divine love, marriage, and family love, among others.

Please submit a 500-word abstract no later than August 1, 2020. If you already have a version of your argument drafted—a conference paper, for example, or a dissertation chapter—you are warmly encouraged to submit that together with the abstract. We are in contact with a university press; our aim is to submit a proposal for the collection in the fall of 2020.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the editors:
Pearl Chaozon Bauer (pchaozonbauer@ndnu.edu)
Erik Gray (e.gray@columbia.edu)