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Description
This conference explores the fluid and unfamiliar contours of predisciplinarity/adisciplinarity in an expansive Romantic Century, 1750-1850. We envision this conference as an opportunity to defamiliarize foundational moments, master narratives, and key figures of the Romantic century, by opening them up to predisciplinary and eccentric objects, encounters, and texts.
Modern disciplines like geology, history, and anthropology often trace their origins to Romantic-era developments. "Literature," as a distinct category of expressive writing also emerged in conjunction with other disciplines, a synthetic dialogue that would later be characterized as a contentious division between "two cultures." So too do sites such as the gallery, the museum, and the academy emerge around this time as new forms of sociability, as attempts to display unruly arrays of pictures and other eccentric specimens. What can Romantic-era aesthetic practices contribute to our understandings of the rise of disciplinarity in the nineteenth century? How can the increasing professionalization and isolation of practices like botany, literary criticism, geology, art and theatre reviews, and collecting illuminate the unruly dynamism of aesthetic forms, both verbal and visual? How do the spaces (whether institutional, geographic, or social) of predisciplinary encounters and formations help shape disciplinary discourses, and how do subjects with varying degrees of agency participate in these discourses? Reading against the grain of the "rise of disciplinarity", and trying to undo its teleological short circuits, this conference seeks to engage imaginatively with the possibilities of predisciplinarity.
Plenary Speakers
James Chandler (Chicago), Jonathan Lamb (Vanderbilt), Nicholas Thomas (Cambridge)'
Possible Topics
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Romantic Disorder: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge 1750-1850 |
| International Conference, 18-20
June 2009 Birkbeck, University of London |
Call for Papers |
Description
This conference explores the fluid and unfamiliar contours of predisciplinarity/adisciplinarity in an expansive Romantic Century, 1750-1850. We envision this conference as an opportunity to defamiliarize foundational moments, master narratives, and key figures of the Romantic century, by opening them up to predisciplinary and eccentric objects, encounters, and texts.
Modern disciplines like geology, history, and anthropology often trace their origins to Romantic-era developments. "Literature," as a distinct category of expressive writing also emerged in conjunction with other disciplines, a synthetic dialogue that would later be characterized as a contentious division between "two cultures." So too do sites such as the gallery, the museum, and the academy emerge around this time as new forms of sociability, as attempts to display unruly arrays of pictures and other eccentric specimens. What can Romantic-era aesthetic practices contribute to our understandings of the rise of disciplinarity in the nineteenth century? How can the increasing professionalization and isolation of practices like botany, literary criticism, geology, art and theatre reviews, and collecting illuminate the unruly dynamism of aesthetic forms, both verbal and visual? How do the spaces (whether institutional, geographic, or social) of predisciplinary encounters and formations help shape disciplinary discourses, and how do subjects with varying degrees of agency participate in these discourses? Reading against the grain of the "rise of disciplinarity", and trying to undo its teleological short circuits, this conference seeks to engage imaginatively with the possibilities of predisciplinarity.
Plenary Speakers
James Chandler (Chicago), Jonathan Lamb (Vanderbilt), Nicholas Thomas (Cambridge)'
Possible Topics
- predisciplinarity and Enlightenment universalism
- cosmopolitanism and predisciplinarity
- sites and spaces of disciplinary formation
- gentlemen experts and professionals
- eclecticism and specialization
- accidents, ephemera, exceptions, monsters
- eccentric objects inside/outside galleries,
museums and other displays
- museum objects, museum narratives, museum
disciplines
- learned societies and institutions
- disciplinarity, punishment and the law
- culturally specific disciplines
- archane, discredited or vestigial disciplines
- counterfactual disciplines: alternative outcomes
- exploration and empire as generators of
disciplines
- frontiers of disciplines
- gender and discipline
- Romantic resistance to disciplinarity
- genres and disciplines
- predisciplinary periodicals and print culture
- travelers before disciplinary boundaries
- the Humboldts and academic disciplines
- evolutionism and disciplinary change
- catastrophism and uniformitarianism: disciplinary transformations
Submissions Deadline
Please send 300-word abstracts to
romantic.disorder@bbk.ac.uk by 1 December 2008.
Organisation
Hosted by the Institute of English Studies (School of AdvancedStudies,
University of London) and the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies
(Birkbeck, University of London), with the support of the Centre for Iberian and
Latin American Visual Studies (Birkbeck, University of London).
Conference Committee
Luisa Calè , Adriana Craciun, Luciana Martins , Sue Wiseman
Email Contact Address
romantic.disorder@bbk.ac.uk
Web Site
www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/research/research_conferences/romantic_disorder