Abstraction

It’s that time of year again, folks: time to start work on our MLA abstracts. The next MLA — also known as the biggest conference in Modern Languages — will be held in Boston, January 3-6, 2013. The deadline for submitting calls for papers is next week, so we can expect more CFPs to trickle in, but it already looks like a great year for Romanticism.

You can browse the full list of CFPs to see if anything makes a good fit for your work (you need to be a current member of the MLA to access the list). But for those of you who are as lazy as I am (or have let your memberships lapse), the specifically Romantic CFPs are below. Note that most deadlines fall in mid-March. Happy abstracting!

“Teaching Byron”
Allied Organization: Byron Society of America
Pedagogical approaches to Byron’s life and works. Any and all aspects of teaching Byron will be considered. Multidisciplinary approaches, global contexts, textual editions, new and/or time-tested approaches. Abstracts of 250-500 words by 10 March 2012; Robin S. Hammerman (rhammerm@stevens.edu).

“Tropes of Passing Time in the 19th-Century European Novel”
Allied Organization: Graduate Student Caucus
We seek papers that investigate narrative strategies employed by authors that construct the passing of time in the 19th-century European novel. 250-word-abstracts; graduate student by 10 March 2012; Ervin Malakaj (emalakaj@wustl.edu).

“Perspective and Interior Spaces before 1850”
Allied Organization: International Society for the Study of Narrative
How do narratives present interior spaces without internal focalization? Do descriptions allow reconstruction through perspectival renderings, or are they nonfocalised, aperspectival? 300-word abstracts and brief bios. by 1 March 2012; Suzanne Parker Keen (skeen@wlu.edu) and Monika Fludernik (monika.fludernik@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de).

“Reimagining the Romantic Imagination”
Allied Organization: Keats-Shelley Association of America
Papers on any aspect of imagination in the Romantic era welcome, including physiological, cognitive, medical, philosophical, scientific, and esthetic constructions. 350-500 word abstracts by 20 March 2012; Alan Richardson (alan.richardson@bc.edu).

“British Romantic Books”
Allied Organization: Wordsworth-Coleridge Association
Essays should examine book production and publishing history, libraries and learned societies, relationships between authors and editors, elucidating how the publication process shaped the reception of British Romantic literature. Abstracts by 15 March 2012; James C. McKusick (james.mckusick@umontana.edu).

“John Clare: Nature and the Self”
Allied Organization: John Clare Society of North America
Papers addressing any aspect of John Clare’s poetry and prose, especially regarding his representation of the human and non-human worlds. One-page abstract by 15 March 2012; Samantha Harvey (samanthaharvey@boisestate.edu).

“The Many 18th Centuries of Orientalism”
Division: Comparative Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
18th-Century Orientalism mediated between distant sociocultural spaces and temporalities, between Europe and far-flung colonies. What was its role in the imperial articulation of disparate civilizations? Abstracts. by 15 March 2012; Aamir R. Mufti (mufti@humnet.ucla.edu).

“Anthropomorphism”
Division: Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century
Papers on anthropomorphism, with a particular interest in critical or strategic uses in or in relation to romanticism and the nineteenth century. Brief abstracts (no more than one page). by 10 March 2012; Sara Guyer (guyer@wisc.edu).

“Risk”
Division: Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century
We request papers addressing the topic of risk as it intersects with Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century. 250-word abstracts by 15 March 2012; Anne-Lise Francois (afrancoi@berkeley.edu>).

“The University of Romanticism”
Division: The English Romantic Period
See Prelude VII:52-57. Relation of Romantic writers/writing to institutions, practices of learning, bodies of knowledge; egalitarianism/elitism/cultural capital; clerisy/heresy/secularism; letters/arts/sciences; clubs, societies, associations, print networks; autodidacticism. 500-word abstracts by 15 March 2012; Celeste G. Langan (clangan@berkeley.edu).

“Mixture and Impurity”
Division: Late-Eighteenth-Century English Literature
Against ancient privilege for purity (of blood, essence, genre), the eighteenth century discovered mixture as a virtue in colors mixed in white light, constitutions, and literary genres. 300 word abstracts by 15 March 2012; William B. Warner (warner@english.ucsb.edu).

“Slow Time”
Division: Late-Eighteenth-Century English Literature
We invite papers that complicate assumptions about modernity’s acceleration of time, including discussions of slowness, deep time, boredom, longing, and nostalgia. 300 word abstracts by 15 March 2012; Kevis Goodman (kgoodman@berkeley.edu).

“The Aesthetics of Vice in French Literature (1800-present)”
Special Session
How do authors give form to vice, which connotes deformation? Possible topics include genre and/of vice, representations of individual vices, addiction, space, time. 300-word abstracts by 15 March 2012; Jessica Tanner (jtanner@fas.harvard.edu).

“Amnesia and the Romantic Novel”
Special Session
Papers discussing the role of amnesia, forgetting or forgetfulness in late-18th or early-19th century novels. Comparative approaches are welcome. Abstracts of 250-500 words by 15 March 2012; Matthew Russell (russelmr@uwm.edu).

“Atlantic Slavery and Transatlantic Romanticisms, 1767-1867”
Special Session
Intimate, vexed relationship between Romantic literature (British, American, and Anglophone) and Atlantic slavery. Approaches that trouble boundaries of period and nation welcome. 250-word abstract and brief c.v. by 12 March 2012; Lucia Hodgson (luciahodgson@tamu.edu).

“British Romantic Expatriates”
Special Session
Essays should examine real and imaginary journeys by British Romantic writers to the United States, and the publication and critical reception of their work in the U.S. before 1850. Abstracts by 15 March 2012; James C. McKusick (james.mckusick@umontana.edu).

“Education and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century England”
Special Session
Explorations of education in England during the long nineteenth century. Topics: narrative representations, educational theory and practice, gender, comparative education. Abstracts of 250 words by 15 March 2012; Kristin C. Ross (kross63348@troy.edu).

“Everyday Romanticism”
Special Session
Papers are welcome that examine the category of ‘the everyday’ in transnational Romantic-era writing, including attempts to theorize the everyday in light of industrialization, imperialism, and world war. 300-word abstract by 15 March 2012; Michael Hardy (mhardy@eden.rutgers.edu) and William Galperin (william.galperin@gmail.com).

“‘A God-Intoxicated Man’: Romantic and Victorian Representations of Spinoza”
Special Session
This session invites papers examining the diverse literary and philosophical representations of Spinoza and “Spinozism” within Romantic and Victorian writing. 250-300 word abstracts by 15 March 2012; Jared McGeough (jared.mcgeough@gmail.com).

“Grotesque Romanticisms”
Special Session
The grotesque as an important aesthetic category within Romanticism and/or as a distortion of the period (grotesque accounts/interpretations of Romanticism). Papers on art, literature, or philosophy. Please send 250 word abstracts by 15 March 2012; Alexander Regier (a.regier@rice.edu).

“Independent Publishing in the Romantic Era”
Special Session
Papers that explore self-publishing during the Romantic Era: inducements, advancements, and/or ramifications. 250-500 word abstracts. by 1 March 2012; Michael Demson (mtd007@shsu.edu).

“Literature and the Materiality of the Past in the British Eighteenth Century”
Special Session
How did intellectual and affective investments in historical objects shape literary and cultural renditions of time, history and modernity? 300-word abstracts by 10 March 2012; Katharina Boehm (katharina.boehm@sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de).

“Malthusian Legacies”
Special Session
The shock waves that Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798 ff.) sent through its age have not abated in ours.  Important studies by Catherine Gallgaher, Maureen McLane, Philip Connell and others have begun to appreciate “Old Pop”‘s impact on–and debt to–British Romantic culture.  Meanwhile, whether appreciated or not, Malthusian themes continue to rear their head in controversies ranging from immigration to contraception, sustainable agriculture to the welfare state.  This session invites proposals for new considerations of Malthus’ key texts, his literary echoes (Erasmus Darwin, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Martineau, Scott, the Shelleys, Wordsworth, etc.), his relation to political economy (Cobbett, Godwin, Ricardo, etc.) and/or his broader intellectual contexts (the human sciences and the fate of the species, sex and social policy, environmental and natural-resources theory, equality and inequality, productivity and unproductivity, race and ethnography, etc.).  Transdisciplinary and transhistorical approaches are especially welcome.  Abstract and bio by 15 March 2012 to Adam Komisaruk, Department of English, West Virginia University (akomisar@wvu.edu).

“Materialism and Positivism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry”
Special Session
Papers addressing entwined yet competing strands of positivism and materialism in nineteenth-century French or English poetry/poetics in philosophical, political, material contexts welcomed. Abstracts 250 words maximum. by 15 March 2012; Brook Haley (jbhaley@uci.edu).

“Narrating Value in the Long Eighteenth Century”
Special Session
How various ways of telling stories about value c. 1660-1830 (e.g., moral philosophy, aesthetics, political economy) emerge, conflict with, and complement each other. 250-500 word abstracts by 15 March 2012; Steven L. Newman (snewman@temple.edu).

“Nineteenth-Century Classics”
Special Session
investigations of the (aesthetic/poetological) relevance of Greek and Roman classics for nineteenth-century British literature. 200 word abstracts by 10 March 2012; Wolfram R. Keller (wolfram.keller@staff.hu-berlin.de).

“Non-theistic Mysticism, Late 1800s-Early 1900s”
Special Session
Papers on non-theistic mysticism as an alternative to religious and other discourses of power (political, positivist, etc.) at the turn of the century. 300 word abstract by 1 March 2012; Nancy LaGreca (lagreca@ou.edu).

“Organic Forms”
Special Session
How have poets revised organic metaphors for poetic form since Coleridge? Papers on organic form and ecocriticism, biopolitics, or experimental poetics welcome. 250-word abstracts by 15 March 2012; Michelle Niemann (mniemann@wisc.edu).

“Resisting Diagnosis in the Long Eighteenth Century”
Special Session
How did “marginalized bodies” (women, non-white, and/or non-British people) respond to, resist, and “write back” against pathologization and objectification by doctors? abstracts of 250-300 words by 15 March 2012; Danielle Spratt (danielle.spratt@csun.edu) and Angela Monsam (monsam@fordham.edu).

“Romantic Embodiments”
Special Session
This panel will consider aspects of bodies and embodiment in British Romantic literature, including body parts, disabled bodies, and embodied subjectivities. 500 word abstracts plus a brief CV or bio. by 15 March 2012; Emily Stanback (emily.stanback@gmail.com) and Leila Walker (leilaswalker@gmail.com).

“Romantic Media Cultures”
Special Session
Short papers for a roundtable of projects addressing questions of mediation, information, communication, systems, epistolarity, print, the book during the Romantic era. Also welcome: transatlantic, translation, digital humanities. 200-word abstracts. by 15 March 2012; Lauren Neefe (lauren.neefe@stonybrook.edu) and Yohei Igarashi (yigarashi@colgate.edu).

“Romantic Science”
Special Session
Papers on Romantic-era literature and the sciences, including but not limited to: the science of aesthetics; literature and the disciplines; Romantic-era science fiction. Abstracts by 15 March 2012; John Savarese (john.savarese@rutgers.edu).

“The Science of Romance Pre-1800”
Special Session
Papers invited on literary depictions of the medical aspects of love. 300-word abstract and a short bio by 17 March 2012 by 17 March 2012; Dorothea Heitsch (dheitsch@unc.edu).

“Teaching Jane Austen”
Special Session

This roundtable will feature speakers who briefly describe innovative ways to teach–or challenges in teaching–Jane Austen and her contemporaries, followed by discussion with audience. 1-page abstracts with brief CV by 20 March 2012; Devoney Looser (looserd@missouri.edu).

“Teaching Romanticism in the Digital Classroom”
Special Session
AI, avatars, students glued to tiny screens: what pedagogies work for “Walden” in today’s classroom? or for the “big six” poets and the Sublime? 500-word abstracts by 15 March 2012; Merle Lyn Bachman (mbachman@spalding.edu).

“Tradition and 19th-Century Lyric Forms”
Special Session
Papers addressing ways nineteenth-century English language poets enlarged upon traditional resources (or kinds) of lyric, and why. 250-400 word proposal and a brief bio by 28 February 2012; Craig Love (clove@uwaterloo.ca).

“Transnational Connections: Looking @ Border Crossing Prior to 1800”
Special Session
Work on visual/written/oral/aural texts pre-1800 that look beyond the idea of nation-state or linguistic groupings; migration of goods/peoples/ideas welcome. Abstracts (under 500 words) by 15 March 2012; Emily Kugler (emkugler@colby.edu).

“War and British Identities from the 17th to the 19th Centuries”
Special Session
This panel examines how war, in intra-national and global contexts, helped shape British identities from the 17th-19th centuries. 300-word abstracts by 5 March 2012; Amy Rodgers (arodgers@ric.edu).

“‘Peterloo’ Revisited”
Special Session
Re-examinations of the historical, political, literary significance of the 1819 Manchester massacre. Papers on Shelley’s 1819 poetry are also welcome. 250-500 word abstracts. by 1 March 2012; Michael Demson (mtd007@shsu.edu).

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