“Monuments and Memory”
INCS 2019 Conference
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
March 21-24, 2019
Ongoing public debate over politically charged public monuments reminds us how much is at stake in the shaping of cultural memory, whether through durable physical structures, portable or reproducible aesthetic works, or discursive representations. How were monumentality and the preservation of the past conceived in the nineteenth century? How might we reconceive our own ways of remembering the nineteenth century? INCS invites proposals for papers and panels that explore monuments in the broadest sense of the word—those from as well as those about the nineteenth century. INCS also welcomes papers that consider the concepts of monumentality and/or memory as they pertain to humanistic disciplines and engage with nineteenth-century studies. Papers might nominate “monuments” (including scholarly ones) that are overvalued, under-appreciated, or ripe for dismantling; explore works, genres, or forms that encourage remembering; analyze nineteenth-century representations of or discourses about memory or monuments; consider the value of ephemera or the contested return to big ideas via digital means that outstrip human memory and cognition. Other topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Public monuments
- Antiques, relics, and ruins
- Monumental texts, paintings, musical compositions
- Monuments of conquest and empire
- Museums and museum studies
- Archives, records and record-keeping
- Monuments, mass production and mass consumption
- Countermonumentality and antimonumentality
- Post-historicist and presentist approaches to the past
- Canons and countercanons
- Crafting a national history
- Crafting global histories
- Grands récits and the longue durée
- (Monumentally) big ideas
- Gaps, silences, and the historical record
- Amnesia and repression
- Trauma, memory, and forgetting
- History painting and the formation of identities
- Commemorative music
- Pageants, anniversary celebrations, and local histories
- People, places, and things remembered and forgotten
- Ephemera
- Postcards, celebrity photography, and souvenirs
- Personal mementos (souvenirs, gift books)
- Memory and 19th-century mourning traditions
- Nostalgia and cultural myth making
- The invention of tradition
- Folk art, folk tales, and folk lore
- Bodily mementos (tattoos, hair jewelry)
- Monuments, gender, and/or sexuality
- Memory and aesthetic form
- Historical novels
- The pastoral
- Elegies, tributes, encomiums
- Ekphrasis
- Victorian medievalism, Victorian neo-classicism
- Neo-Victorianism/steampunk as cultural memory
- Pre-Raphaelitism
- Tableaux vivants
- Memorization and repetition
Deadline: October 27, 2018. For individual papers, send 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual proposals plus a 250-word panel description. Please include a one-page CV with your name, affiliation, and email address. Proposals that are interdisciplinary in method or panels that involve multiple disciplines are especially welcome. Upload to web page portal (still under construction 2/25/18). Send inquiries to Beth Newman (bnewman@smu.edu). For graduate student travel subventions, contact Shalyn Claggett (src173@msstate.edu). For more information visit smu.edu/INCS2019.