CFP: Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

Special Issue of Nineteenth Century Studies

Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

deadline for submission: August 15, 2024

full name(s)/name of organization:

Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard co-editors/Nineteenth-Century Studies

contact email(s): wcastenell@wlu.eduahazar1@saic.edu

This special issue will explore how Blackness was constructed and problematized by a hegemonic global structure across national boundaries during the long nineteenth century. The issue will pay particular attention to emerging concepts of Black identities during this period.  Critically, majority narratives have driven these constructions, propagating mediated histories that subjugate Black people, yet the full impact of these narratives has not been thoroughly explored and needs additional interrogation. Essays might consider topics related to images, texts, other forms of media, and more. Possible topics could include expressions of Black autonomy in white supremacist cultures; colonialism/decolonization; trauma studies; slavery/emancipation; Black soldiers; Black artists/photographers/writers; the development and expression of stereotypes; the practice of lynching; the transatlantic migration and the Black diaspora; and other relevant subjects. Nineteenth Century Studies publishes studies of nineteenth-century world cultures in all humanistic fields, including literature, art history, history, musicology, and the history of science and the social sciences. It is an interdisciplinary journal issued annually by the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. One exciting aspect of Nineteenth Century Studies is that the journal encourages authors to enhance their contributions with pertinent artwork.

Please submit manuscripts for scholarly essays of 6,000-10,000 words, pedagogical essays of 2,000-4,000 words, or book reviews of 600-1000 words formatted in Chicago Manual Style to guest editors Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard at wcastenell@wlu.edu and ahazar1@saic.edu. Additionally, we welcome suggestions of books for review relevant to the theme of this special issue. Please send your suggestions to the editors. Early expressions of interest and proposals of topics are also welcome. The initial deadline for submission of full manuscripts will be August 15, 2024, but earlier submissions are encouraged.

Nineteenth Century Studies Association Awards

NINETEENTH CENTURY STUDIES ASSOCIATION
Award Submission Deadline July 1, 2023.
ncsaweb.net/
Submissions to the Emerging Scholars Award and the Article Prize are due July 1, 2023. Winners will each receive a cash award of $500 to be presented at the Annual NCSA Conference.

The Emerging Scholars Award
The work of emerging scholars represents the promise and long-term future of interdisciplinary scholarship in nineteenth century studies. In recognition of the excellent publications of this constituency of emerging scholars, this awardrecognizes an outstanding article or essay published during the author’s doctoral studies or within the six years following conferral of a doctorate. The winning article will be selected by a committee of nineteenth-century scholars representing diverse disciplines. The winner will receive $500 to be presented at the annual NCSA Conference in 2024. Applicants are encouraged to attend the conference at which the prize will be awarded.  Entries can be from any discipline and may focus on any aspect of the long nineteenth century (the French Revolution to World War I), must be published in English or be accompanied by an English translation, and must be by a single author. Submission of essays that are interdisciplinary is especially encouraged. Articles that appeared in print in a journal or edited collection in 2022 or between January 1, 2023 and June 30, 2023 are eligible for the 2024 Emerging Scholars Award; if the date of publication does not fall within that span but the work appeared between those dates, then it is eligible. Articles may be submitted by the author or the publisher of a journal, anthology, or volume containing independent essays.

More information and link to submit articles are HERE: ncsaweb.net/ncsa-emerging-scholars-award/
Inquiries can be directed to:  Dr. Claudia Martin, Chair of the Emerging Scholars Committee at  claudiam@binghamton.edu  OR EmergingScholarsNCSA@gmail.com .

The Article Prize
The Article Prize recognizes excellence in scholarly studies from any discipline focusing on any aspect of the long nineteenth century (French Revolution to World War I). The winning article will be selected by a committee of nineteenth-century scholars representing diverse disciplines. The winner will receive a cash award of $500 to be presented at the Annual NCSA Conference. Entries can be from any discipline, must be published in English or be accompanied by an English translation, and submission of essays that are interdisciplinary is especially encouraged. Articles that appeared in print in a journal or edited collection in 2022 or between January 1, 2023 and June 30, 2023 are eligible for the 2024 Article Prize; if the date of publication does not fall within that span but the work appeared between those dates, then it is eligible. Articles may be submitted by the author or the publisher of a journal, anthology, or volume containing independent essays.

More information and link to submit articles are HERE: ncsaweb.net/ncsa-article-prize/

Inquiries can be directed to: Dr. Scott Moore, Chair of the Article Prize Committee at mooresc@easternct.edu ORArticlePrizeNCSA@gmail.com

Articles submitted to the NCSA Article Prize competition are ineligible for the Emerging Scholars Award and vice versa; only one entry per scholar or publisher for one of the two awards is allowed annually. Nineteenth-Century Studies Association’s Officers, Board, Senior Advisory Committee, and Article Prize and Emerging Scholars Award Committee members are not eligible to receive the award until two years have elapsed since their service.

CFP: Histories of People of Color @ Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference

The Nineteenth-Century Studies Association is currently collecting papers for potential inclusion in their 2023 conference, to be held at the end of March in Sacramento, CA.  We are seeking papers to include in a panel proposal for the conference and would love to hear from those interested in participating. The working description for the panel is described below.  We welcome scholars from any discipline interested in participating in our panel to submit an abstract and one page CV no later than August 25th.  Abstracts and CVs can be emailed directly to  ahazar1@saic.edu andwcastenell@wlu.edu.  If the panel is chosen, panelists will need to be current members of NCSA by the time of the conference.

Working Panel Description:
Working Title: The Why of History: Rethinking Histories of People of Color Within Structures of Power in the Long 19th-Century US
The history of BIPOC people and other marginalized groups in the US is one that has been overlooked and continuously rewritten to preserve a narrative that privileges the majority population, and specifically those within structures of power.  These narratives have been put forward as the foundation of the history of many of the major events of the long 19th century, including the institution and effects of slavery, the Civil War, and westward expansion, among other histories. Throughout this history, the role and treatment of marginalized groups has been framed in a way that is at best heavily mediated, and is often inaccurate.  Although significant steps have been taken in recent years to rectify these oversights and reframe trends of history and culture that have formed our understanding of events and the mechanisms that surround them, it is still an area that requires investigation.  Doing this helps us to better understand how national narratives and histories have shaped the perception of past events and their impact on marginalized people by bringing to light new considerations that resituate these overlooked and misunderstood histories in the historical narrative.  This panel will interrogate the ways in which we have understood and continue to understand the history of BIPOC people and other marginalized groups in the US in the long 19th century, and the way that cultural artifacts including but not limited to images, literature, and other archival documents have mediated that understanding.

CFP: Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference 2023

Remaking the Past
44th Annual Conference
Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
Sacramento, California
March 30 – April 1, 2023

Sacramento, host city for NCSA’s 2023 conference, lends itself to exploring issues of revivals and re-creations of the past. Sacramento’s nineteenth-century history encompassed California’s Gold Rush, the genocide and displacement of Indigenous populations, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the building of a capital city that became a stage for the reinventions–productive and problematic–of the past so central to the nineteenth century. Appropriately, Sacramento’s conference will explore the nineteenth century’s almost constant desire to re-envision and measure itself against the past, as well as our own responsibility as scholars to reassess the histories we tell about this era, using current critical approaches, concerns, and theories.

CALL FOR PAPERS

We seek perspectives into the wide range of nineteenth-century reinterpretations of the past and their consequences. We invite papers and panels covering and uncovering political history, social history, history of science, literature, visual and performing arts, and popular culture. We welcome interdisciplinary and inclusive approaches that revisit and broaden ways of looking at the nineteenth century, including those that interrogate constructions of gender, race, settler-colonialism, and ethnicity as seen in, or that were created about, that era. We also invite papers that examine communities, artifacts, or epistemologies that resist remaking the past, including those that explore cultures for which preserving the past unaltered was/is a form of survival and resistance.

In addition, we welcome papers that scrutinize historical consciousness during the nineteenth century. These could assess the varied tendencies to rewrite history, to revive or bury the past, and to appeal to the past as a legitimizing force, as a spur to the imagination, and as a field for questions and contradictions. Such papers could consider the past as a force in political discourses, in education and science, and in debates on the value of studying it at all.

Topics may include:

  • stylistic revivals in nineteenth-century art, architecture, and design
  • traumatic or “buried” histories of displacement, forced migration, genocide
  • recovering Indigenous and African-American nineteenth-century cultures of resistance
  • antiquarianism and issues of historical preservation and interpretation of nineteenth-century material culture
  • California history including Chinatowns, Spanish historical sites, settler-colonial sites of mourning, the preservation and interpretation of California’s Indigenous, Hispanic, and Asian communities
  • uses of historical fiction and revivals of past authors, playwrights, and composers
  • imagery of the past in nineteenth-century popular culture and advertising
  • Neo-Victorianism, adaptations (both book and film), and digital/data-driven re-imaginings of the nineteenth century
  • the use of real or imagined pasts in literature and the performing arts, the notion of revival as a trope, or of retrospection as a creative device
  • remaking or “differencing” 19th-century canons, critical pedagogy, and banned books
  • utopian golden ages of the past and future
  • invented pasts/invented traditions, fakes, lies, and forgeries

Please use this google form to send 250-word abstracts with one-page CVs bySeptember 30, 2022. Abstracts should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and paper title in the heading. We welcome individual proposals, panel proposals with four presenters and a moderator, or larger roundtable sessions. You are welcome to share calls for panels and roundtable discussions on our social media channels. You may post your call to our Facebook page and we will share it, or tag us on Twitter and we will gladly retweet.

Note that submission of a proposal constitutes a commitment to attend if accepted. Presenters will be notified in November 2022. We encourage submissions from graduate students, and those whose proposals have been accepted may submit complete papers to apply for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses. For questions, please contact us at 2023ncsa@gmail.com.

CFP: Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference

RADICALISM & REFORM
The 43rd Annual Conference
Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
Rochester, New York
March 16-19, 2022
Proposal Deadline: September 30, 2021

Conference Website: ncsaweb.net/conferences/2022-ncsa-conference-information/

Join NCSA’s mailing list: mailchi.mp/4b3379af336e/ncsamailinglist

Inspired by the history of radicalism and reform in Rochester, New York, the NCSA committee invites proposals exploring the radical possibilities of the nineteenth-century world. From the aftershocks of the French and American revolutions to mutinies and rebellion in colonies across the globe, the nineteenth century was a period of both unrest and possibility. Abolition, suffrage, and reform movements reshaped prisons, education, and housing, marking this century as a period of institutional making and unmaking: a reckoning with ills of the past that was also profoundly optimistic about a more just and prosperous future.

Radicalism is also a generative term for considering transitional moments or social tensions: “radical” is often used interchangeably with “extreme,” but its earliest definitions describe not what is new or unusual, but what is foundational or essential. “Radical” is used to describe literal and figurative roots: the roots of plants, roots of musical chords, and the roots of words. To be radical is to embody tensions between origins and possibilities: to be anchored in what is foundational while also holding the potential for paradigm-shifting change. We welcome papers that consider these tensions in nineteenth-century culture, as well as those that consider possibilities for reforming nineteenth-century studies or academic life. Topics on nineteenth-century literature, history, art, music, or other cultural forms might include political movements or divisions, activism, resistance, labor, collective and direct action, or mutinies and rebellion. We also encourage broader interpretations of the conference theme: outsiders and outcasts, visionaries, agents of change, utopias, breakthroughs, failed reforms, conformity, or stagnation.

Topics on the state of nineteenth-century studies might include politically engaged teaching and scholarship, academic labor practices, harassment or prejudice in the academy, or new approaches to humanities education.

For more information, visit: ncsaweb.net/conferences/2022-ncsa-conference-information/

CFP: Discovery @ Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference

DISCOVERY

The 42nd Annual Virtual Conference
Nineteenth Century Studies Association
March 11-13, 2021
Proposal Deadline: October 31, 2020

Website: ncsaweb.net/current-conference-2021-cfp/

NCSA welcomes proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and special sessions that explore our theme of “Discovery” in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). Scholars are invited to interrogate the trope of “discovery” by questioning the term’s ideological and colonial implications. Why was the concept of “discovery” so appealing in the nineteenth century, and what does its popularity tell us about the people and social structures that were so invested in it? Papers might also consider indigenous perspectives that challenge ideas of western “discovery” and settler colonialism, new voices that theorize and critique nineteenth-century “discoveries,” intellectual exchange between cultures, and other methods of unmasking narratives of exploration and “discovery.”

As an interdisciplinary organization, we particularly seek papers by scholars working in art/architecture/visual studies, cultural studies, economics, gender and sexuality, history (including history of the book), language and literature, law and politics, musicology, philosophy, and science (and the history of science). In light of the many changes in pedagogy, research, and the exchange of ideas we have all experienced this past year, we particularly welcome papers, panels, or roundtable topics that address discoveries in the use of technology for nineteenth-century studies and teaching.

Papers might discuss recovering forgotten manuscripts, or discovering new ways of thinking about aesthetic and historical periods. Scholars might explore not only the physical recovery of the past (archeology, geology), but also intellectual recovery as old ideas become new (evolution, neoclassicism, socialism, spiritualism). Papers might discuss publicizing discoveries (periodicals, lectures), exhibiting discoveries (museums, world’s fairs, exhibitions), or redressing the legacy of nineteenth-century practices (decolonization of museum collections and the repatriation of colonial-era artifacts). Other topics might include rediscovering and revisiting the period itself: teaching the nineteenth century, editing primary texts, and working toward diversity and social justice in the humanities. For more details, visit: ncsaweb.net/current-conference-2021-cfp/

CFP: Nineteenth Century Studies Association Annual Conference 2019

40th Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

March 7-9, 2019

Kansas City, Missouri

EXPLORATIONS

The NCSA conference committee invites proposals that examine the theme of explorations in the history, literature, art, music and popular culture of the nineteenth century.

Disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to this theme are welcome from North American, British, European, Asian, African and worldwide perspectives.

From the early nineteenth century, when Lewis and Clark paddled through the Kansas City area on their way up the Missouri River to explore the North American continent, through the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the building of factories and railroads, the mechanization of agriculture, and the advent of mass-produced cultural artifacts, the American Midwest became a crossroads for explorers and inventors, hucksters and entrepreneurs, artists and musicians, poets and dreamers who pursued their discoveries toward destinations made possible by the wide-open spaces of the Great Plains. In this way, the Kansas City region is emblematic of a larger set of trends in the global evolution of culture that radically altered the fundamental conditions of human existence during the nineteenth century.

How does the discovery of new geographical knowledge change the perception of human possibility?

How do innovations in science and technology affect the development of literature, music and art?

How does the recovery of previously unheard voices – of women, of workers, of ethnic minorities and people of color – influence the understanding of social history in America and the wider world?

Topics for investigation include encounters between Western explorers and indigenous people; the impact of steamships and railways upon changing perceptions of time and space; resistance and accommodation between traditional folkways and mass-produced culture; and the development of new idioms in literature, art and music to express the broader horizons of nineteenth-century self-awareness.

Proposals are due by September 30, 2018. Send 300-word abstracts (as an email attachment in MS Word format) along with a one-page CV to ncsa2019@gmail.com

Call for Roundtable Proposals:

Roundtable discussions provide conference attendees the opportunity to engage in spirited conversation and collaborative exchange of information and resources. The format of roundtable discussions will be lively, interactive discourse among presenters and conference participants, not lecture or panel-style delivery.

Roundtable sessions will be 80 minutes long. Presenters should regard themselves primarily as facilitators and should limit their own prepared remarks to five minutes or less. Extensive collaboration among the presenters before the conference is encouraged, since the goal is to foster extensive, diverse, and cogent perspectives on interdisciplinary research topics of general interest to NCSA members.

Roundtables should be pre-organized by a group of 4-8 presenters. To propose a roundtable topic, please send a single 300-word abstract describing the general topic of the roundtable (as an email attachment in MS Word format) to ncsa2019@gmail.com.

Your abstract should include the proposed session title and the full name of each presenter, with their email and phone contacts, job title and affiliation. Indicate which presenter has agreed to serve as discussion moderator. Please be sure to confirm the participation of all presenters before submitting your abstract.

Roundtable proposals are due by September 30, 2018.

Conference Venue: The conference will be held at the newly renovated Marriott Country Club Plaza in midtown Kansas City, adjacent to the open-air shops and restaurants of the Country Club Plaza and in easy walking distance of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Conference Registration will open in December 2018. AV requirements are due January 1, early registration closes on January 20, and registration ends on February 20.

Conference website: http://www.ncsaweb.net/Current-Conference