"Romantic Insurrections / Counter-Insurrections"
North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
International Conference on Romanticism
Georgetown University
Washington, DC
August 15-18, 2024
Abstracts due: January 5, 2024
The 30th Annual NASSR Conference, with the support of the International Conference on Romanticism, convenes this year in Washington D.C., a city that witnessed on January 6, 2021 an insurrection, which Padma Rangarajan has described as a “a rebellion in miniature.”
Thinking from this place, participants are invited to reflect on the nature of insurrection and the counter-insurrections that follow in the wake of uprisings. Romanticism has often been associated with the politics of “revolution,” which suggest a wholesale inversion or overturning. The organizers wish to ask about other motions and scales of action and repressive reactions that took place in the nineteenth century. Where did seemingly small acts of resistance spark enormous consequences? How do we understand the relationship between political insurrection and the subjective “state of insurrection and turmoil” that Victor Frankenstein describes or Jane Eyre’s “brain in tumult and…heart in insurrection”? Are there lessons that we can draw from nineteenth-century insurrections – social and textual – and bring to bear upon our present political realities? How might recent uprisings and the often-aligned state and white supremacist counters to them revise our reading of the past?
The conference will feature keynote lectures by Padma Rangarajan (UC-Irvine), Gregory Pierrot (University of Connecticut), and Lisa Lowe (Yale), as well as a plenary conversation between Osama Jarrar and Lucy Perry of the Arab American University in Palestine.
Please submit abstracts of 250 words, panel proposals of 750 words (including details of individual papers plus a rationale for the panel) using the submission form by January 5, 2024.
More information and the submission form can be found at https://www.bigger6.com/cfp.