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The Charles Brockden Brown Society invites papers for its 2008 conference in Dresden:
Empire, Revolution, and New Identities:
Geoculture and Geopolitics in Brown and his Contemporaries.
(6th Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society)
Thursday-Saturday October 9-11, 2008
Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, DE
Our conference theme emphasizes current efforts to explore Brown and his era in terms of historical systems and forces that exceed traditional perspectives based on the nation-state. From his earliest writings and novels to the late Annals of Europe and America, Brown reflected on imperial and colonial systems, and drew on revolutionary-era print and intellectual networks that connected writers across his circum-Atlantic context. Our focus on geopolitics and geoculture in Brown and his contemporaries relates historical versions of these questions to contemporary scholarly work from “trans” or “post” nationalist perspectives on a variety of topics, from Empire and Colonialism to new formations of the subject.
The Dresden conference will mark the Brown Society’s return to Europe. At the heart of Mitteleuropa and in a region central to the German Enlightenment, Dresden will be an ideal location to consider international themes and the reconfiguration of national boundaries. The conference site in Dresden offers special opportunities for engaging with questions concerning Brown and German or Central-European Enlightenment, the cultural politics of Sturm und Drang and early romanticism, and the period’s German-language novelistic and historical production generally.
The conference organizers offer this general rubric to include a wide range of possible topics. We invite work not only on Brown, but also on his “contemporaries”: figures and topics that intersect with Brown, and other writers or topics in eighteenth-century or revolutionary culture (US or other) that contribute to our understanding of the conference topic in general. As always, we are particularly interested in papers and panels that address Brown’s non-novelistic writings and post-novelistic period after 1801. Possible topics for papers and panels include:
--Theories and discourses of empire, imperialism, and colonialism then and now, and their use in reading Brown and other texts and practices of the eighteenth century and revolutionary-Napoleonic period.
--Empire, imperialism, colonialism and the gothic, from Brown to Shelley and beyond.
--Eighteenth-century and revolutionary women’s writing on empire.
--Brown and the German Enlightenment, philosophy, or literature: Brown and Schiller, Wieland, Kotzebue, or German science during the Enlightenment (Mesmer, Lavater, etc.).
--Schiller, Tschink, Grosse, and the Schauerroman.
--Relations between Brown’s Circle, British Radical Circles, and German Culture (e.g., via Holcroft and Dunlap’s many translations from the German).
--Anglophone radical enlightenment (British, Irish, Scottish) and its relations with German Romanticism.
--Citizenship, civil society, and commerce in Brown and his contemporaries.
--Slavery, domesticity, sex-gender, and the development of modern status-group distinctions in the eighteenth century and revolutionary-Napoleonic era.
--Wollstonecraft, revolutionary-era feminism, and the transnational legacy of women’s issues.
--Historical or fictional romance, romantic love, and transnational intrigue (e.g., Wollstonecraft-Imlay-Godwin; Sansay-Burr, Hemmings-Jefferson; fictional pairings such as Pleyel—de Stolberg, Arthur Mervyn—Achsa Fielding, Constantia-Martinette-Sophia, etc.).
--Travel, Travel writing, and the representation of boundaries, regions, nations, etc.
Instructions for submissions:
Deadline: Monday, June 2, 2008.
Please send electronic files of 250-word paper and panel proposals to all three of the following addresses: Philip Barnard (philipb@ku.edu), Bryan Waterman (bryan.waterman@nyu.edu), and Lisa West (lisa.west@drake.edu).
Travel Support for Graduate Students:
Two Alfred Weber Travel Awards of $500 each for graduate student participation will be awarded, funded by the Brown Society. Criteria for these travel subventions will favor students at the dissertation stage (over those in earlier stages of degree work) and those who have not previously presented at a CBBS meeting. Graduate students applying for a subvention should indicate their interest in a cover letter and provide information about whether or not they are ABD.
For further information about the conference, please consult the website of the Charles Brockden Brown Society: http://www.brockdenbrownsociety.ucf.edu/
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