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.