Deadline: October 8, 2021
Contact: Leslee Thorne-Murphy
Email: INCS2022@utah.edu
Nineteenth-Century Strata
Call for Papers
INCS March 24-27, 2022, Salt Lake City, Utah
Held in a region of rich fossil beds, towering crags, plunging canyons, and the snow-capped Rocky Mountains, the 2022 INCS Annual Conference in Salt Lake City will dig deep into questions about
stratification – physical and social, spatial and temporal, visual and textual. We invite papers that consider the myriad varieties of literal and figurative layering that played out across the nineteenth century. This conference will foreground how exploratory and creative acts of digging down and building up expose new truths and generate new knowledge – both in the nineteenth century and in our present work as scholars of the period. Please join us in our transdisciplinary and interconnected investigations into what lies below, above, and on the surface.
Papers might address:
• Class Interaction, Wealth Distribution
• Race and Racial Uplift
• Layering and Bending Gender and Sexuality
• Social Climbing, Passing, Transvestivism
• Family Trees and Generational Conflict
• Descent and Breeding
• Secrets and Skeletons in the Closet
• Memory and the Subconscious
• Food Chain, Foodways, and Cookery
• Fads and Fashions
• Disability and Access
• Geology, Deep Time, the Longue Durée
• Evolution and “Lower” Animals
• Taxonomy and Classification
• Museum Display and Public Spectacle
• Archeology and Paleontology
• Exploration, Excavation, and Exhumation
• Horticultural Layering
• Urban Planning and Architecture
• Photomontage and Trick Photography
• Pastiche, Collage, Patina
• Empire, Center, and Periphery
• Displacement, Migration, and Travel
• Self and Soul, Spiritual Layering
• Surface Reading/Deep Reading
• Neo-Victorianism and Writing Over the Past
• Drafts, Revisions, Palimpsest
• Digging in the Archives
• Digital Mapping and New Media
• Victorian Historiography and Scholarly Presentism
• Any 19th-Century Topic
INCS has a unique panel format to facilitate discussion and
collaboration. Presenters precirculate a written version of the papers
shortly before the conference and give a 7-8 minute synopsis during
their panels, leaving ample time for dialogue and exchange.
For paper proposals, send a 200-word abstract and a one-page CV to INCS2022@utah.edu by
October 8, 2021. For panel proposals, please provide a brief overview of the panel in an e-mail
message and attach all paper proposals and CVs.
For more information
contact Jessica Straley, jessica.straley@utah.edu
or Leslee Thorne-Murphy, lesleetm@byu.edu.
Keynote Speakers
Tanya Agathocleous
Associate Professor of English, Hunter College, CUNY
Tanya Agathocleous’ integrative and interdisciplinary scholarship considers stratification in
political, legal, architectural, and corporeal contexts, making visible the effects of imperial
structures and spaces on lived experience. Her latest book Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and
Colonial Law in the Anglosphere examines the far-reaching effects of anti-sedition law on the
overlapping and discordant political spheres of India and Britain.
Jennifer Tucker
Associate Professor of History, Wesleyan University
Deftly blending the fields of visual history and the history of science in Nature Exposed:
Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science, Jennifer Tucker explores the cultural, legal,
and medical meanings evoked by the photograph in its early development. Her current work
on mining and chemical extraction exposes the labor history and environmental effects
beneath photography’s glossy finish.
Plenary Panelists
Göran Blix
Professor of French, Princeton University
In From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology, Göran
Blix shows how archeology’s acts of excavation bequeathed a metaphor through which
nineteenth-century historians, visual artists, and authors theorized the interlocking
relationship between past and present. His recent work maps out a subterranean genealogy of
biophilia and ecoapathy from Rousseau to Zola.
Judith Madera
Associate Professor of Literature, Wake Forest University
Judith Madera’s Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American
Literature incisively redefines place as a palimpsest of local, regional, national, and
hemispheric histories, metaphors, and allegiances working both in consort and conflict. Her
new project explores the radical geographies of African American and Caribbean literatures
and the Black emancipatory politics of the abolition epoch.
Shundana Yusaf
Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Utah
As an historian of architecture, Shundana Yusaf explores the spatialization of politics and
culture, replacing visual modes of understanding design with attention to the oral and aural
practices that characterize built environments. Her book in progress, The Resonant Tomb: A
Feminist History of Sufi Shrines in Pakistan, explores gender contestation in public sacred
spaces including those excavated in the nineteenth century.
Posted on August 4, 2021
