For this year’s INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) 2016 conference, which will be held in Asheville, NC from March 10th-13th, 2016, Appalachian State University is seeking papers that investigate Nineteenth-century histories and natures; “Natural and Unnatural Histories”. The papers and preliminary proposals should focus on how natures, environments, or ecologies interact with histories at different scales – the local, the national, the transnational, or the planetary. Submissions should also center around the notion of how might Nineteenth-century natural histories help us to rethink historicism in the present.
Historicism achieved its full flowering in the nineteenth century, when the historical methods of inquiry envisioned by figures such as Vico, Herder, and von Ranke were taken up and transformed in philosophy, art criticism, hermeneutics, philology, the human sciences, and, of course, history itself. By 1831, John Stuart Mill was already declaring historicism the dominant idea of the age. Taking human activity as their central subject, some Nineteenth-century historicisms extended Hegel’s distinction between historical processes governed by thought and non-historical processes governed by nature. At the same time, scientists like Lyell and Darwin radically challenged Nineteenth-century understandings of history by arguing that nature itself is historical. Powered by fossil fuels, industrialization began to prove this point by profoundly altering global ecologies at a previously unimaginable scale.
The submission deadline for this INCS is Monday November 2nd, 2015. Proposals must be uploaded via the conference website – incs2016.appstate.edu. For individual papers, send 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual proposals plus a 250-word panel description. Please include a one-page CV with your name, affiliation, and email address. Interdisciplinary proposals in method or panels that involve multiple disciplines are welcome! For any further questions, please contact Jill Ehnenn at incs@appstate.edu.
Please refer to the following link for further information: http://www3.nd.edu/~incshp/INCS2016CFP.pdf
Leave a Reply