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CFP: 28th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)


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.

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

POSTER: Please see attached and share widely.

**The deadline for general submissions is 24 January 2020.**

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