3/12/05)

Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Studies
Ninth Annual Graduate Conference
Organized by the Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Studies Students'
Collective (NISSC)

"New Technologies, New Forms"

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
David M. Scobey
Associate Professor of Architecture
Director, Arts of Citizenship Program
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Saturday, March 12, 2005
Green College, University of British Columbia

deadline for abstracts: February 7, 2005

CALL FOR PAPERS

The nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of technological change,
alongside which emerged new physical, discursive, and intellectual forms.
Technological innovation produced, and was produced by, changes in social
practice and transformations in subjectivity-by the new ways people related
to and perceived their environments-as well as by changes in knowledge,
ways of knowing, and relationships of power.

We seek proposals that engage diverse aspects of technological change
across the nineteenth century. We welcome topics that relate to any nation
or geographic region. Paths of inquiry may include, but are not limited to,
the following:

-Technology and the growth of the nineteenth-century metropolis: urban
space; the expansion of systems of public transportation, railroads,
canals; architectural innovations; the rise of industrialism and commodity
culture

-The relationship of technology to transformations in representation-
literature, the visual arts, new media-and to transformations in modes of
reading, viewing, and perception in the human subject

-New communication technologies: printing methods, photography, the
telegraph, Braille, the radio, the telephone

-Transformations in tourism and entertainment: "exotic" travel, circuses
and spectacles, zoological landscapes

-Global technological exchanges: economic expansionism visualized through
geographic grids (mapping, cartography), world's fairs, and expositions

-New social formations: organized political engagement with new
technologies

-Scientific changes-mathematics, physics, natural science-and the
"pseudosciences"

-Optical transformations: telescopic developments, planetary discoveries

-New legal and penal forms: law, gender, sexuality, bodily regulation

-Religion, science, and technology: struggles and exchanges (Lamarck,
Darwin, phenomenalism, etc.)

-Innovations in musical form: the invention of new instruments,
compositional change

-Medical technologies, changing procedures, and the human body

Please send abstracts (maximum 400 words) and biographies (maximum 30
words) to 19cgradconferencegmail.com by February 7, 2005. Papers should
not exceed 20 minutes. Audiovisual equipment will be available to
presenters.