**The deadline for submissions to 2014 C19 has now passed.
C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists seeks paper and session submissions to its third biennial conference, which will take place March 13-16, 2014 at the Carolina Inn and the beautiful University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill campus.
We invite individual paper or group proposals on any aspect of U.S. literary cultureâbroadly conceivedâduring the long nineteenth century, including those that bring insights from visual, sound, or performance studies into conversation with literary and textual studies. Our conference theme is âCommons.â The Commons has a contested history in nineteenth-century America. At its simplest, âCommonsâ constitutes a mutually held resource (lands, goods, communal labor, intellectual property, civic values). It refers to shared political, economic, social, and cultural practices that may seem at odds with the period’s investment in individualism and privatization. Still, the nineteenth century worked to establish a variety of institutions, practices, and spaces committed to commonality. These range from Brook Farm to Hull House, from the National Mall to Central Park, from the Smithsonian Institution to local history museums and lending libraries. Commons customs include everything from commonplace books and the practice of reprinting to worker cooperatives and utopian communities. In selecting the theme of Commons, we seek papers and sessions that identify collective sites of mutuality and contestation, whether literary, historical, material, methodological, disciplinary, or conceptual. Inspired by new work in digital humanities, by collaborations across disciplines, and by increasing scholarly engagement with social and environmental questions, the organizers of C19 wish to put into practice a value expressed by Bruno Latour: âThe critic is ⦠the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.â We also wish to acknowledge the challenges and limits of the Commons addressed by nineteenth-century thinkersâconformity, intolerance to dissent, unacknowledged exclusions, and mob mentality.
Topics and approaches might include but are not limited to: nature, landscape, and the built environment; the ethics of land-sharing and resource management; public spaces and parks; theories of democracy and democratic life; literary collaborations and collectivities; collective forms of labor, including unions, syndicates, parties, and interest groups; utopias; information networks and their protocols; distributed, flat, or other “open” systems of communication; imagined alternatives to intellectual property and copyright; new conceptions of authorship; the politics of access and archiving; communitarian legacies and new media practices (the âdigital commonsâ); pre-capitalist or non-capitalist economies or modes of value; common law; common sense; commonwealths; common tongues and the vernacular; the commonplace and everyday; local, regional, or transnational knowledge; non-Anglophone publics; destruction and reconstitution of indigenous commons; pedagogical practices; beliefs and values that we, as a field, hold in common; why Commons now?
As common ground in all its meanings seems more elusive than ever, with the privatization of once-public places, the dismantling of public education and social programs, and the degradation of the environment, C19 affirms the idea of the Commons as a vital occasion for retrieving an American tradition rooted in collective imaginings. We particularly welcome presentations that address the rich cultural, political, and literary history of our conference location in North Carolina and that draw on the unique resources of the campus: the Wilson Rare Book Library (with the largest collection of Civil War novels in the world), the Southern Historical Collection, the Southern Folklife Collection, the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, the American Indian Center, the Ackland Art Museum, and the digital resource Documenting the American South.
Formats
In keeping with our theme, we invite imaginative formats that emphasize conversation and interactive dialogue. In this vein, we will introduce seminars to the C19 conference this year. Seminars will provide participants the opportunity to have a collaborative conversation around a particular topic. Seminars will be capped at 15 participants and be run by a leader with expertise in the topic. Each participant will submit a five-page position paper before the conference to be read in advance by the other participants so that seminar time can be reserved for discussion. Seminar topics are listed on our Seminars page. Seminar participants will be listed in the program.
Individual and group proposals may be imagined within a variety of session formats, including but not limited to thematically related talks (with or without respondents); roundtables addressing developments, key debates or new publications in the field; seminars on pedagogy; support sessions on professionalization and publication; dialogues on archival finds and under-appreciated works; and Pecha Kucha-style slide/talk presentations. Sessions that feature participants from a range of institutions and academic ranks will be given preference. All group proposals must leave time for discussion (each session is 90 minutes long). Individuals seeking potential collaborators may wish to use the discussion board on C19âs Facebook page.
Conference participants are limited to one appearance on the program in a substantive role (that is, as a presenter, roundtable participant, or respondent), and one appearance as a session organizer, chair, or speaker/facilitator on a professional support session. Participants are allowed to present a paper and join a seminar.
For information on submitting proposals, click here.