CALL FOR PAPERS:
BRITISH ASSOCIATION OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICANISTS PANELS AT THE BAAS CONFERENCE, UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX 2019

The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists invites submissions to three panels to be submitted to the British Association for American Studies Conference, taking place at the University of Sussex, April 25-27, 2019.
More information about the BAAS Conference can be found here: https://hes32-ctp.trendmicro.com:443/wis/clicktime/v1/query?url=https%3a%2f%2fbaas2019.org&umid=016d9e0b-a105-487d-b682-597d2d539645&auth=768f192bba830b801fed4f40fb360f4d1374fa7c-52377cb15bc80a57e1060df589f0c07061ccc65d
More information on BrANCA and its activities can be found here: https://hes32-ctp.trendmicro.com:443/wis/clicktime/v1/query?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.branca.org.uk&umid=016d9e0b-a105-487d-b682-597d2d539645&auth=768f192bba830b801fed4f40fb360f4d1374fa7c-192f481ce12a7f0134bd94404c8afcadee66837f

1. OPEN PANEL ON 19th CENTURY AMERICANIST TOPICS
Each year BrANCA hosts a special panel at BAAS showcasing progressive, interdisciplinary work on the United States in the long nineteenth century. This year BrANCA invites paper proposals on any relevant topic to be included within a sponsored panel at the BAAS Conference the University of Sussex, April 25-27, 2019.

We invite proposals for papers from all researchers working in the field. We are particularly interested in global, hemispheric and transatlantic approaches to key themes in nineteenth century literary studies, and papers that propose new ways of conceiving the field, but are open to all submissions. Researchers at all stages are welcomed, and papers from postgraduates are particularly encouraged.
250 word proposals for 20-minute presentations (including a provisional title and brief biography) and related queries should be sent to the BrANCa Conferences Coordinator, Dr. Matthew Pethers at matthew.pethers@nottingham.ac.uk by Wednesday 31st October 2018.

2. RADICALISM, TRADITION, AND MEMORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
In keeping with this year’s BAAS conference theme of “Activism and Radical Thought,” and its reference to the East Sussex connections of Thomas Paine, BrANCA also welcomes submissions on the more specific topic of the relationship between radicalism, tradition and memory in nineteenth-century America.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Paine declared in Common Sense (1776), a revolutionary mantra taken up by his self-declared adherents in the nineteenth-century labor movement in both America and Europe, and echoed by countless other activists campaigning for abolitionism, gender equality and political freedom through the Civil War and beyond. Yet in borrowing not only such resounding phrases, but also a host of protest strategies, media tactics and ideological goals from a shifting panorama of earlier – frequently failed – moments of revolution these nineteenth-century activists often confronted, or at the very least elided, a paradox at the heart of the idea of a “radical tradition”: the paradox of building a new society on the foundation of efforts to conserve an earlier (albeit briefly glimpsed) social order. As scholars such as J. Michelle Coghlan, Shelley Streeby and Alistair Bonnett have recently suggested, the twinned concepts of memory and nostalgia hold an important and invariably complex position in the thought and practice of nineteenth century radicals. Circulating physically between nations, and intellectually between historical precedents, like Paine himself, these figures consistently negotiated the limitations and promise of key dates in what Coghlan calls “the radical calendar” – 4th July 1776, 14th July 1789, 23rd February 1848, January 1st 1863, 18th March 1871, 4th May 1886, and many more.

We invite proposals on these topics, and any others related to the interrelationship between radicalism, tradition and memory in nineteenth century America and the Atlantic world. Researchers at all stages are welcomed, and papers from postgraduates are particularly encouraged.

250 word proposals for 20-minute presentations (including a provisional title and brief biography) and related queries should be sent to the BrANCa Conferences Coordinator, Dr. Matthew Pethers at matthew.pethers@nottingham.ac.uk by Wednesday 31st October 2018.

3. QUEERING NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
In keeping with the 2019 BAAS conference’s special focus on LGBTQ+ history, BrANCA invites papers that address queerness in and queer readings of nineteenth-century American literature.

As Travis Foster notes, “where nineteenth-century American literature is concerned, there is plenty of queerness to go around” – from canonical and much rehearsed examples like Moby-Dick’s sperm squeezing, to more recently recovered texts like the anonymous 1857 short story “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” and Ralph Wether’s Autobiography of an Androgyne, written in the late nineteenth-century but not published until 1919. While this recovery work has produced an expanded body of queer writing, scholars are still debating the terms under which we might gather and analyse the diverse expressions of desire, community and identity found in nineteenth-century texts. More work is also needed to trace the ways in which queer identities and feelings intersect with racial, gender and social class identities that were positioned as non-normative by those in power.
At the 50th anniversary of Stonewall and a moment when LGBTQ+ rights are under fresh attack from some quarters, we might further ask whether we can trace relationships between the queer nineteenth-century and later LGBTQ+ literature, theory and politics without imposing a progressive and linear timeline that queerness itself resists. How can notions of recursion, longing and the untimely (notably theorized by Peter Coviello) help us understand the legacies of the queer nineteenth-century?

We welcome proposals on these and other topics in queer nineteenth-century studies, and also papers that critique queer theory as applied to nineteenth-century literature, or discuss the place or absence of queer theory in pedagogy and the academy.

250 word proposals for 20-minute presentations (including a provisional title and brief biography) and related queries should be sent to the BrANCa Conferences Coordinator, Dr. Matthew Pethers at matthew.pethers@nottingham.ac.uk by Wednesday 31st October 2018.