The NASSR conference, which will bring together 300-400 scholars to discuss literature, philosophy, art, and culture c.1770-1840, will take place at the University of Toronto, Ontario on August 6-9, 2020.
CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://sites.utoronto.ca/wincs/nassr2020
Keynote Speakers: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University) Martin Myrone (Tate Britain)
Topics may include (but are not limited to):
Re-envisioning Romanticism: looking back and looking forward
Visions and the visionary: perception, prognostication, projection, speculation, the speculative
Ways of looking: reading, conceptualizing, observing, peeping, gazing, categorizing, examining, recognizing and misrecognizing
Visual culture, philosophy, and aesthetics: objects of sight, spectacle, the spectacular, the sublime and the beautiful
Reading methods and histories: careful, close, distant, surface; plagiarism, copyright law
Print culture in its social, theoretical, and physical aspects (e.g. text, design, structure, layout); manuscripts, letters, journals, scrapbooks, books, journals, newspapers
The seen and the unseen: noumena, phenomena, the spirit world, apparitions and appearances
Romantic iconoclasm and anti-representationalism; ocularcentrism and “the tyranny of the eye”
Visual communication: text, numbers, notation (e.g. musical), images, sign language, placards, banners, flags, gestures, hieroglyphs, emblems, insignia
Questions of form and representation
Fashionable looking: costume, hair, makeup, manner, style, taste, places to see and be seen
Visualizing gender and sexuality: identity, performance, politics
Visual and scenic arts: sculpture, painting, illustration, graphic satire, print shops, pornography, broadsheets, dioramas, panoramas, architectural and landscape design
Theatre and performing arts: set design, lighting, visual effects, costume, body movement, dance, pantomime, attitudes, tableaux vivants
Art collection and assessment: museums and curation, connoisseurship, formal and evaluative concerns (e.g. light, color, pattern, shape, scale, proportion)
Visualizing class: social hierarchies and signifiers (e.g. clothing, heraldry, pageantry), occupational and economic segregation
Instruments of looking: lenses, spectacles, quizzing glasses, spy glasses, Claude glasses, prisms, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, orreries, windows
Forms of illumination and darkness: lightning, electricity, candlelight, lamps, gas light, spotlights, limelight, torches, fireworks; shade, shadow, twilight, gloom, obscurity
Religious vision(s): prophecy, revelation, enthusiasm, sermons and hymns, public and private devotion, natural and revealed religion
The science of the eye: vision, optics, visual anatomy, medicine, pathology, disability, blindness
Data visualization (e.g. land, economy, population studies): mapping, cartography, geography, geolocation, charts, diagrams, categorization, numerical and pictorial statistics
Visualizing race: slavery, racism, racialization, minoritization
Vision and ecopoetics: seeing nature (vistas, prospects, the picturesque); noticing and reading features of land, water, and sky; watching weather and recognizing climate; the animal gaze
Envisioning space and place: the local and the global, home and abroad, the peripheral and transperipheral
Envisioning (the ends of) empire: imperialism, colonialism, sites and sights of war; decolonization, indigenization
Political and military forecasting, strategy, optics, campaigns, battlegrounds, political theatre
Imagining the future of Romanticism; strategizing its work in the humanities, in the university, and in society
EMAIL CONTACT: nassr2020vision@gmail.com
POSTER: Please see attached and share widely.
**The deadline for general submissions is 24 January 2020.**