Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences
Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO) and Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE)
Western University, London, Ontario, Canada
May 30 to June 5, 2020
VSAO-Sponsored ACCUTE Joint Session:
From Charles Dickens’s ecopoetical rivers, to the wondrous route across the sea to Treasure Island, the Victorian era was resplendent with images of water, seafaring, and global travel. At the same time, as J.M.W. Turner’s visceral abolitionist painting Slave Ship attests, society was literally kept afloat by the oceanic trade routes which forcibly moved both human (slaves) and inhuman cargo (colonized resources) throughout what Paul Gilroy has famously coined “the Black Atlantic.” The word “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ushering in the formal study of diverse ecosystems, terrain sites and watery worlds which were then being transformed by industrial capitalism and imperialism. Indeed, Victorians saw the power of “the Anthropocene” unleashed during that grave epoch in which the human species became, and has remained, the dominant influence on our planet’s climate and environment.
This panel invites papers that examine the ways in which water, land, and the ecological world connecting them were constructed in this era.
Possible themes might include but are not limited to:
- representations of seas, landscapes, and ecosystems
- eco-writing, eco-criticism, print culture, illustration
- tourism, parks, maritime histories, leisure activities
- decolonial representations, anthropocene studies, global Victorian literatures
- histories of imperialism, colonization, migration, diasporic communities and slavery
- genre fiction and ecologies
- spatial histories, environmental architecture in urban, rural, domestic and cultural spaces
Please send an email attachment of your 300-to-500-word paper proposal, without personal identifying marks, and the 2020 Proposal Info Sheet available on the ACCUTE website to Emily Rothwell and Lin Young c/o ACCUTE’s email:info.accute@gmail.com, by November 15, 2019.