Call for papers
A cultural history of countercultures in the long-nineteenth century
Bloomsbury Cultural Histories Series

 Abstract Deadline: December 1, 2026

Although the term “counterculture” is a recent development, tracing back only to the 1970s, cultural movements and ideals that reject established social values and practices, or that oppose traditional, entrenched mores and expectations, have a much longer history. Indeed, many of the social transformations associated with the modern era emerged from such challenges to the mainstream. Enlightenment thought rejected blind faith in tradition, even as some reformers enacted harsh censorship while circulating their own pornographic or heretical texts clandestinely. Romanticism elevated rebellion against social strictures, even as it was leveraged as a tool of nation building. Bohemian circles challenged bourgeois class conventions and norms around drug use, even as many bohemians benefitted from systemic societal privileges. Some abolitionist and suffrage movements in nineteenth-century Europe and the Atlantic world contested both the bourgeois model of the “angel of the hearth” and the developing pseudoscience used to justify enslavement, racism, and, eventually, eugenics, even as other reformers worked within eugenic frameworks or fostered an understanding of gender that, in many places, led women’s rights to be more restricted at the end of the century than they were at its outset. 

These and other countercultural formations provide the basis for this volume, which explores the emergence, scope, and impact of countercultures, broadly understood, amid the consolidation of industrial modernity and bourgeois hegemony in the long nineteenth century. The organizers seek essays that examine the relationships between dominant cultural forms, alternative ways of being, and interpretive frameworks that resisted, transgressed, or rejected the mainstream. Did countercultures consistently develop in direct opposition to cultural norms? How were they subsumed, assimilated, or rejected by dominant cultural actors? To what extent did cultural practices, political movements, and aesthetic forms that departed from the norm transform the status quo?

This series understands countercultures as collective formations that, across historical periods, make everyday life a site of transgressive refusal. Through alternative ways of living, believing, expressing, organizing, and belonging, they challenge dominant norms and reveal the boundaries of the proper, sacred, respectable, and legitimate as historically made, contested, and open to change; some remain fleeting experiments, while others help make broader social transformation imaginable.

(Inter)disciplinary research essays in any field are welcome. Essays should speak to a broad, interdisciplinary audience, and should respond to one of the following topic areas, within the context of the long nineteenth century:

• Countercultural movements and their origins
• Rebels and poets
• Aesthetics and sounds
• Transgressive genders and sexualities
• Cults, drugs and rituals
• Hybrid identities at the crossroads
• Resistance and counterpublic spaces
• Culture wars

These topics are held in common across A Cultural History of Countercultures, so essays not aimed specifically at one of these areas cannot be considered for inclusion in the volume.

A 250-word abstract and one-page CV are due by December 1, 2026, to rhirjohn@iu.edu. Full articles (max 10,000 words), if requested, will be due April 15, 2027. Please indicate in your abstract which topic area your essay addresses. Submissions may not be under review or published elsewhere.

Image Source: A Wreath of Roses (1880) by Marie Spartali Stillman