Transporting Romanticism
RSAA Biennial Conference
Wellington, NZ
16-18 February, 2017
In the last decades of Humanities scholarship, mobility and mediation have become increasingly central, as scholars emphasise boundary-crossing rather than differentiation, movement rather than stasis, and such ideas as the porosity of individuals and communities, and a world connected in unforeseen and complex ways by the circulation of global traffic. Movements of people, objects, information, genres, and feelings, both within intimate spaces and over vast distances, have come to seem increasingly important, becoming central to work of scholars such as Celeste Langan, Alan Bewell, Mary Favret, Adela Pinch, Miranda Burgess and many others. The Romantic era provides a particularly apt site for these critical discussions because it marks the period in which a shift occurred toward thinking in terms of mobility that would become associated with modernity. Mediation contributes to the idea of mobility by suggesting liminal states, border-crossings, and negotiations, but has also been used in the work of Kevis Goodman and others to suggest the way in which Romantic literature is shaped both by the medium in which it is consumed, and by the tangential texts, disciplines, and discourses which it rubs up against. This conference aims to move between mediation and mobility, to suggest the ways in which “transport” might be understood as a range of places, motions, emotions, experiences, and reconfigurations.
We welcome proposals from scholars across the Humanities that address ideas related to mediation and mobility in Romantic contexts.
Possible topics might include:
- movement and being moved
- mobile texts, objects and bodies
- mobile emotions/ mediated emotions
- mobile genres/mobile readers
- global mobilities
- gendered mobilities/mobile genders
- Transpacific mobilities
- travelling natures
- transported readers/transported writers
- emotional transport (especially the history of the emotions: please see the Postgraduate Bursaries that are attached to this theme)
- mediating beyond the centre and the periphery
- translation as mediation
- mediated reading
- mediating and remediating Romanticism
- mass mobilization in the Romantic era
- mobilization of Romantic texts
- mobile methods
Please submit abstracts of 250 words, and a 100-word bio note, to rsaa2017submissions@gmail.com. We will be making decisions on a rolling basis.
Call for Papers closes: 20 August, 2016
