Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) 2016: Natural and Unnatural Histories
Keynote Speakers Kate Flint (University of Southern California) and Elaine Freedgood (NYU)
March 10-13, 2016, Renaissance Asheville Hotel, Asheville, NC
Hosted by Appalachian State University
incs2016.appstate.edu
Historicism achieved its full flowering in the nineteenth century, when the historical methods of inquiry envisioned by figures such as Vico, Herder, and von Ranke were taken up and transformed in philosophy, art criticism, hermeneutics, philology, the human sciences, and, of course, history itself. By 1831, John Stuart Mill was already declaring historicism the dominant idea of the age. Taking human activity as their central subject, some nineteenth-century historicisms extended Hegel’s distinction between historical processes governed by thought and non-historical processes governed by nature. At the same time, scientists like Lyell and Darwin radically challenged nineteenth-century understandings of history by arguing that nature itself is historical. Powered by fossil fuels, industrialization began to prove this point by profoundly altering global ecologies at a previously unimaginable scale. We seek papers that investigate nineteenth-century histories and natures. How do natures, environments, or ecologies interact with histories at different scales—the local, the national, the transnational, or the planetary? What role does the nineteenth century play in the recent idea of an Anthropocene era? How might nineteenth-century natural histories help us to rethink historicism in the present? What are the risks and promises of presentist approaches to the nineteenth century? Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Narrating history, narrating nature
- Ideas of the natural, the unnatural, and/or the supernatural
- Nineteenth-century ecologies broadly construed: domestic ecologies, aesthetic ecologies, imperial and postcolonial ecologies, synthetic or technological ecologies
- Evolution and extinction
- Posthuman histories
- History, nature, and/or science in art
- Family histories, social histories
- Climate change, geosystems, geohistories
- Bioregionalisms, transregionalisms, literature and “sustainability”
- Queer ecologies/histories
- Disability histories/Cripping nature
- Life and non-life
- Flora, fauna, and fossils
- Ecopoetics, Environmental justice
- Reporting events/recording nature
- Commemorative musical compositions/performances
- Biopolitics, biopoetics
- Discourses of pollution, toxicity, garbage, waste
- Resource imperialism
- Political ecologies and economies
- Cross-cultural, indigenous, mestizo, subaltern nature writing
- Creaturely life, life forms, nonhumans, monstrosity
- Landscape aesthetics
- Global South studies
- Utopian/dystopian, steampunk, or neo-Victorian natures and/or histories
- Nineteenth-century histories of philosophy, religion and/or theology
- History of science, history of medicine, public health discourses
- Natural disasters, cataclysmic events
- Sexological, criminological, and/or psychiatric narratives
- Resources, capital, economies
- Biography and autobiography, case studies, archives
- History as genre: history painting, Bildungsroman, epic, historical novel, historical drama, etc.
Deadline: November 2, 2015. Upload proposals and a one-page CV via incs2016.appstate.edu. For individual papers, send 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual proposals plus a 250-word panel description. Proposals that are interdisciplinary in method or panels that involve multiple disciplines are especially welcome. Questions? Contact Jill Ehnenn at incs@appstate.edu
(Image: Artist in His Museum (1822), Charles Willson Peale. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr. Collection) www.pafa.org)