"Mobilities"

The nineteenth century has long been understood as an era of industrial growth, scientific discovery, technological innovation, and imperial expansion. Such sweeping global transformations relied on a complex web of relations between humans and machines, individuals and systems, ideas and practices, as well as more efficient and frequent movement across increasingly connected networks of space. From railroad travel to advances in shipping, from the movement of immigrants, enslaved laborers, scientists and colonial settlers, to the circulation of ideas, bodies, and/as commodities, nineteenth-century mobilities challenged and reconfigured the very constitution of subjects, nations, and cultures across the globe. The committee seeks papers that investigate the various mobilities and exchanges of the nineteenth century. What did it mean to be mobile (or immobile) in this period? How were political, scientific, and cultural ideas exchanged in new ways? How did people maintain and create new alliances and affiliations? How might notions of a more mobile sense of nature, the world, and the self influence our understanding of this era?  Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Mapping, geographies, travel
• Exile, migration, borders
• Transportation and communication networks
• Information, collection, and data
• Communities, networks, and alliances
• Germs, diseases, contagion
• Mobile/immobile bodies
• Prosthetics, physical culture
• The body as a circulatory system
• Medical and scientific networks
• Imperialism, warfare, journalism
• Circulating texts, sensation fiction
• The press, publishing, mobility and digitization
• Cities, networks of industry
• Education, circulating knowledge
• Teaching the nineteenth century
• Visual culture, mobility and cinema, photography
• Neo-Victorian culture, steampunk
• Digital culture/revisiting the nineteenth century
• Spiritualism, mediums, religious movements
• Mobile knowledge/disciplines and institutions
• Race, immigration, diasporic mobility
• Gender and mobility: the New Woman, feminism
• Professional and class mobility
• Mobile sexualities/underground networks
• Evolution/degeneration
• Cycles of nature/natural history and mobility
• Science fiction/time travel/futures
• Imaginary spaces/architectural sites
• Domesticity/rootedness/rituals

Deadline: November 15, 2014. 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.  Send questions and proposals to narin.hassan@lmc.gatech.edu and/or carol.senf@lmc.gatech.edu