C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists; Second Biennial Conference (Website)

Time: April 12-15, 2012
Venue: Berkeley City Club
Deadline: October 1, 2011

Following upon the success of the first C19 conference at Penn State University in 2010, we invite individual papers or panels on any aspect of U.S. literary culture-broadly conceived-during the long nineteenth century, including those that bring insights from visual, sound, or performance studies into conversation with literary/textual studies.

Topics and approaches might include but are not limited to transnational, hemispheric, and oceanic studies; the impact of new media and digital technologies on research and teaching practices in the field; history of the book and print culture; critical race, ethnicity, indigeneity, border and diaspora studies; urban/rural studies and critical geography; gender, sexuality and queer studies; religion, belief, and secularization; democracy and citizenship; the body, affect, and disability studies; science and technology studies; spectatorship, collecting, and museum studies; migration, multilingualism, and translation; literature and philosophy; theories of the archive and the canon.

Our conference’s location in Berkeley, California offers the opportunity to rethink conventional framings of the development of American nationhood as well as its literary and cultural traditions. We are especially interested in paper and panel submissions that tie in to the conference site: for example, through the work of writers and intellectuals who either found their way to California or imaginatively engaged with exploration, travel, and migration across the continent or throughout the wider Pacific world. Other site-related papers might reconsider familiar works or historical paradigms, such as expansionism, from this position at the „edge“ of the continent. We encourage submissions that complement the UCB Bancroft Library’s strengths-including not only its Mark Twain collection, but its extensive holdings in Western, Latin American, and Asia-Pacific authors and texts; its archives of Native America and of the Mexican borderlands; and its materials on environmentalist and utopian movements in California as well as nineteenth-century drama, performance, and humor in general.

Further details about C19 and the conference, including instructions on how to submit a proposal, are available at the conference’s website.

Contact
Paul J. Erickson
Director of Academic Programs
American Antiquarian Society
508-471-2158