Call for papers: Resistance in the Spirit of Romanticism Symposium

We hope this K-SAA sponsored project will be of interest to our members, readers, and followers:  ‘The University of Colorado Boulder Romanticism Collective and the Romantic Bicentennials project invite proposals for a symposium on “Resistance in the Spirit of Romanticism” to be held in Boulder, Colorado September 6-8, 2018.  This meeting will be part of the on-going, international celebrations commemorating the many milestones of the romantic period being sponsored by the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Byron Society of America. Plenary talks will be given by Saree Makdisi, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, Marjorie Levinson, F. L. Huetwell Professor of English at the University of Michigan, and Deanna Koretsky, Assistant Professor at Spelman College.  We invite you to think both about the spirit of resistance in the romantic period and the ways it informs liberation movements today. Resistance marked romanticism in the era of revolutions and rebellions in the U.S., in France, throughout the Caribbean, and in South America. It drove revolutions in industry, science, and technology; and revolutions in thinking about gender, race, rights, and the arts. The symposium will also reflect upon the relevance of romantic politics to our current moment of cultural change, connections between the historical legacy of black resistance and Black Lives Matter, or the continuing importance of gender and women’s rights in our complex, troubled moment. Topics to explore might include: Black Rebellion in the Caribbean; Women’s resistance; Resisting Violence; Resisting France (1789-1815); Experimental Art as Cultural Resistance; Resisting Resistance from Spa Fields to Peterloo (1816-1819).  We invite proposals for a range of different kinds of presentations. We will include standard conference papers, as well as roundtables on particular topics, several sessions with five-minute “flash” papers, and an event in Denver that will involve interaction among participants and the public and could involve more public-directed work. We invite innovative formats for presentations, but the maximum length for papers will be 15 minutes. Questions, statements of interest, or 200-word abstracts should be sent to romanticresistance@colorado.edu by March 15, 2018.’