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20th Anniversary British Women Writers Conference "Landmarks"
June 7-10, 2012
Boulder, Colorado
In 2012, the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Conference (BWWC) will commemorate its 20th anniversary by focusing on the theme of “Landmarks.” Rich in both physical and metaphorical significance, landmarks form loci by which we organize history and chart the development of individuals, nations, and cultures. We therefore invite papers that explore how women writers and their texts engage with an ever-changing geography that is both material and abstract. These conference papers could address the people, places, events, and texts that have made their marks on history, and/or the processes and implications of marking, mapping, reading, preserving, overwriting, or erasing. Likewise, we wish to investigate land as space and place, acts and effects of landing or arriving, marks of land upon people and cultures, geographical and imaginative landscapes, liminal no-(wo)man’s-lands, and the state of being landed (or not) with property.
Please send a 500-word abstract to bwwc2012@colorado.edu by January 15, 2012. Panel proposals are also welcome. Papers should address the conference theme and apply it to 18th-century, Romantic, or Victorian texts.
Possible topics include:
- Landmark Events and Ideas: Historical moments; defining milestones; turning points; crises or victories; anniversaries; stages; experiments; memories or visions; aesthetic debates; scientific discoveries; technologies
- Landmark Works: Publication and reception; authorship or readership; emerging genres; histories or chronicles; canon formation; travel writing
- Geographical Land Marks: Historical or tourist sites; borders and national boundaries; high points and burials; property and ownership; memorials, monuments, museums; ruins and traces
- Making Marks: Print culture; media; diaries and personal writings; glosses, annotations, and marginalia; building, development, or enclosure; landscaping and gardening; architecture; fashion and costume design; cosmetics and tattoos; creating space and place; epitaphs, cemeteries, tombs
- Reading, Interpreting, or Imagining Lands/Marks: Physiognomy or phrenology; psychics; reading practices; sciences of navigation; distance and time; fictional worlds
- Mapping/Preserving Marks: Maps and cartography; emblems; classification systems; libraries, museums, collections
- Marks of Land on People: Farming and agriculture; gentility and nobility; industry; food and foodways; defining the local, national, imperial, native, or foreign
- Contested Marks and Marks of Difference: Stealing/transplanting landmarks; marks of faith or creed; religious practices; the supernatural; commerce, currency, credit; ownership; identity politics or marginalization
