The European Society of Nineteenth-Century Art (ESNA) invites all nineteenth-century devotees to submit a proposal for the 2016 ESNA conference "City of Sin: Representing the Urban Underbelly in the Nineteenth Century" . The conference will be held at the Rijksmuseum and van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on May 19-20, 2016.

In conjunction with the exhibitions Easy Virtue: Prostitution in French Art, 1850-1910 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) and Girls in Kimono: The Breitner Variations (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), ESNA organizes its annual two-day international conference around the topic of the “urban underbelly” and its depiction in nineteenth-century art. The conference seeks to broaden the perspective of the two exhibitions by inviting papers that deal with urban marginality in the widest sense.

Topics to be explored may include, but are certainly not limited to: crime and punishment; criminals and their pursuers; gambling and other clandestine activities; female and male prostitutes; alcoholics and drug addicts; hobos and bohemians; the homeless and those who care for them; the (working) urban poor and the unemployed; the insane and the hysterical; the ill and the dying; the gay community, dandies, cross-dressers and transgenders avant-la-lettre; and practitioners and practices considered sexually morally deviant. Contributions may deal with images in any medium, created in any urban center and at any time during the (long) nineteenth century (we especially welcome papers focusing on the early nineteenth-century).

Please send proposals (max. 300 words) for a 20-minute paper (in English) for this conference to esnaonline@hotmail.com by 18 December 2015 at the latest.

For more information on the conference, please see https://esnaonline.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/cfp_esna-congress-2016-city-of-sin1.pdf