North American Society for the Study of Romanticism

NASSR 2024 Romantic Insurrections / Counter-Insurrections

August 15-18, 2024 Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

Photo by Fernando Decillis, from the Stop Cop City / Weelaunee Forest Defenders Movement, Atlanta, GA (2022)

We convene the 30th Annual NASSR Conference in Washington D.C., a city that witnessed on January 6, 2021 an insurrection, which Padma Rangarajan has described as a “a rebellion in miniature.” Thinking from this place, we invite participants to reflect on the nature of insurrection and the counter-insurrections that follow in the wake of uprisings. Romanticism has often been associated with the politics of “revolution,” which suggest a wholesale inversion or overturning. We wish to ask about other motions and scales of action and repressive reactions that took place in the nineteenth century. Where did seemingly small acts of resistance spark enormous consequences? How do we understand the relationship between political insurrection and the subjective “state of insurrection and turmoil” that Victor Frankenstein describes or Jane Eyre’s “brain in tumult and…heart in insurrection”? Are there lessons that we can draw from nineteenth-century insurrections – social and textual – and bring to bear upon our present political realities? How might recent uprisings and the often-aligned state and white supremacist counters to them revise our reading of the past?

Please submit abstracts of 250 words, panel proposals of 750 words (including details of individual papers plus a rationale for the panel) using the submission form by January 5, 2024.

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NASSR Statement on Virtual Conferencing

As NASSR members are aware, the NASSR Board passed a motion in 2022 that all future NASSR conferences would have some virtual component. This commitment was made in light of several concerns with in-person only events, including the carbon emissions resulting from air travel, uneven accessibility, and total cost of attendance (as virtual attendance enables savings on travel and accommodations), amongst other matters. To repeat what we said in our earlier announcement of this position, “We do not envision any particular solution to the complexities of bringing a virtual element into NASSR conferences; the approach in each case will depend on the decisions of conference organizers in response to the specific opportunities and constraints that they face.”

All conference organizers are free to decide on what form the virtual aspect of their conferences will take according to the host universities’ needs, technical capabilities, and financial situations. Conference attendees are reminded that virtual conferencing cannot be the equivalent of in-person conferencing; some of the benefits of the in-person meeting will always be lost and the limitations will be many. Technological support for virtual participation is also expensive, further limiting what organisers can accomplish on this front. However, the benefits are also clear and NASSR is committed to supporting members for whom in-person attendance is impossible or highly problematic. We ask that NASSR members keep these challenges in mind if they opt for virtual participation and remember that conference organization for our society is voluntary, unpaid work by people who most often do not have expertise in virtual-event hosting.