Annual Conference

Unprecedented Disruptions: Nineteenth-Century Scholars Reflect on 2020

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Academia was already “in crisis” when we hit 2020, a year of disruption, anxiety, and uncomfortable self-reflection. A global pandemic forced us back into our homes at the very moment Black Lives Matter demanded that we take to the streets. These twinned events gave us occasion to reflect on our pedagogy and research goals, and our intellectual commitment to studying the nineteenth century as we were roiled by a forced reengagement with some of the most regressive aspects of the twenty-first.

This issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts is devoted to the disruptions and dislocations of 2020, and also to the possibility that this moment may offer the opportunity to rebuild our fields of study. We invite short essays in the personal voice (2,000-4,000 words) that reflect and engage with our teaching and research at this moment of crisis and reinvention.

We encourage contributors to address a wide range of pedagogical and ethical issues related to inclusivity, diversity, and the (ir)relevance of nineteenth-century studies in “this moment”:

  •            Synchronicity: the challenges of remote learning
  •            Does remote instruction exacerbate racial inequalities?
  •            Confronting pandemic denial/racism in the classroom
  •            Rethinking traditional disciplines in response to Black Lives Matter
  •            Can 19th-century legacies illuminate current uncertainties?
  •            19th-century upheavals/unrest: lessons for today
  •            Academic Doomscrolling
  •            “Abundance of Caution”
  •            “No Words”
  •            F2F
  •            Zoom Apnea
  •            “I think you’re muted”

We welcome articles from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds such as art history, literary criticism, history, philosophy, musicology, and religious studies. We especially welcome contributors from diverse backgrounds and career stages, including graduate students, contingent faculty, and independent scholars.

Deadline for article submissions: March 1, 2021. Special Issue will appear Fall 2021.

For more information about the journal and guidance on how to submit, please see: www.tandfonline.com/gncc. When submitting, be sure to indicate that is for the special issue on “Unprecedented Disruptions.”

For specific questions about this issue, contact George Robb robbg@wpunj.edu or Narin Hassan narin.hassan@lmc.gatech.edu

INCS 2022 “Strata” | March 24-27 | Salt Lake City, UT

Held in a region of rich fossil beds, towering crags, plunging canyons, and snow-capped mountains, the 2022 INCS Annual Conference in Salt Lake City will dig deep into questions about stratification – physical and social, spatial and temporal, visual and textual. We invite papers that consider the myriad varieties of literal and figurative layering that played out across the nineteenth century. This conference will foreground how exploratory and creative acts of digging down and building up expose new truths and generate new knowledge both in the nineteenth century and in our present work as scholars of the period. Please join us in our transdisciplinary and interconnected investigations into what lies below, above, and on the surface.

Papers might address:

• Class Interaction, Wealth Distribution
• Race and Racial Uplift
• Layering and Bending Gender and Sexuality
• Social Climbing, Passing, Transvestivism
• Family Trees and Generational Conflict
• Descent and Breeding
• Secrets and Skeletons in the Closet
• Memory and the Subconscious
• Food Chain, Foodways, and Cookery
• Fads and Fashions
• Disability and Access
• Geology, Deep Time, the Longue Durée
• Evolution and “Lower” Animals
• Taxonomy and Classification
• Museum Display and Public Spectacle
• Archeology and Paleontology
• Exploration, Excavation, and Exhumation
• Horticultural Layering
• Urban Planning and Architecture
• Photomontage and Trick Photography
• Pastiche, Collage, Patina
• Empire, Center, and Periphery
• Displacement, Migration, and Travel
• Self and Soul, Spiritual Layering
• Surface Reading/Deep Reading
• Neo-Victorianism and Writing Over the Past
• Drafts, Revisions, Palimpsest
• Digging in the Archives
• Digital Mapping and New Media
• Victorian Historiography and Scholarly Presentism
• Any 19th-Century Topic

Abstract Submission

INCS has a unique panel format to facilitate discussion and collaboration. Presenters precirculate written versions of their papers shortly before the conference and give 7-8 minute synopses during the panels, leaving ample time for dialogue and exchange.

For paper proposals, send a 200-word abstract and a one-page CV to INCS2022@utah.edu by October 8, 2021. For panel proposals, please provide a brief overview of the panel in an email message and attach all paper proposals and CVs.

For more information contact Jessica Straley, jessica.straley@utah.edu, or Leslee Thorne-Murphy, lesleetm@byu.edu.