Call for Papers | NEASECS 2013, New Haven
From the conference website:
Northeast American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference | The Ends of War
Yale University, New Haven, 3-6 October 2013
Proposals due by 3 May 2013
Joseph Wright of Derby, The Dead Soldier, ca. 1789
(Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
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Yale University is pleased to host the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, an event it last hosted in 1993. Home to Sterling Memorial Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Lewis Walpole Library (in nearby Farmington), the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, and host institution for The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, and the Yale Indian Papers Project, Yale has longstanding traditions in eighteenth-century studies across the disciplines. The Beinecke, which in 2013 is celebrating its 50th anniversary, will host the conference’s welcome reception.
2013 marks the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht, signed in April 1713, formally ending the War of the Spanish Succession, and the 250th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years War, known in its colonial North American theater as the French and Indian War. What are The Ends of War? The phrase here reflects the elusive Johnsonian sense in the quotation on the home page, above, implying both cessation, but also paradoxically what lives on after formal cessation, as well as the deeper, more troubling sense of “ends” as aims, purposes, intentions, and perhaps unintended consequences. Do wars end, or end anything? Beyond the massive geo-cultural realignments that followed especially from the global conflicts of 1757–1763, what are the social, literary, aesthetic, and artistic consequences of war and its ends? And what did and do these ends look like at the other ends of the earth, non European, non North American? We welcome papers on any aspect of these and other related questions. In keeping with NEASECS traditions, panels and papers addressing elements of the long eighteenth century not directly related to the conference theme are also welcome.
Proposals for panels should be submitted to the Program Committee at neasecs2013@yale.edu by May 3, 2013. Panel proposals will be listed on this website on a rolling basis, as received and approved, through the Spring. Paper proposals should be sent directly to the panel organizers at the addresses they provide. The conference welcomes traditional panels of three 20-minute papers (with chair, and respondent if desired), as well as roundtables, sessions on Teaching Approaches, State-of-the-Field debates, or other sessions with variously innovative formats. Individual papers on topics not addressed in the proposed panels may be sent directly to the Program Committee, which will try to accommodate them in thematically grouped sessions. Please submit them by June 30, 2013.
For a current list of panel proposals, click here. It will download as a separate word file.
Panel organizers should notify panelists of acceptance or otherwise by June 30, 2013, and submit completed panels, noting AV or any other special requirements, to the Program Committee, at neasecs2013@yale.edu, by July 15, 2013. The conference program will be posted on the conference website in August.
New Book | Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art
Due out in June from Ashgate:
Philip Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 260 pages, ISBN: 978-0754664925, $105.
In a moving intervention into Romantic-era depictions of the dead and wounded, Philip Shaw’s timely study directs our gaze to the neglected figure of the common soldier. How suffering and sentiment were portrayed in a variety of visual and verbal media is Shaw’s particular concern, as he examines a wide range of print and visual media, from paintings to sketches to political prose and anti-war poetry, and from writings on culture and aesthetics to graphic satires and early photographs.
Whilst classical portraiture and history painting certainly conspired with official ideologies to deflect attention from the true costs of war, other works of art, literary as well as visual, proffered representations that countered the view that suffering on and off the battlefield is noble or heroic. Shaw uncovers a history of changing attitudes towards suffering, from mid-eighteenth century ambivalence to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concepts of moral sentiment. Thus, Shaw’s story is one of how images of death and wounding facilitated and queried these shifts in the perception of war, qualifying as well as consolidating ideas of individual and national unanimity. Informed by readings of the letters and journals of serving soldiers, surgeons’ notebooks and sketches, and the writings of peace and war agitators, Shaw’s study shows how an attention to the depiction of suffering and the development of ‘liberal’ sentiment enables a reconfiguring of historical and theoretical notions of the body as a site of pain and as a locus of violent national imaginings.
Contents: Introduction; Seeing through tears I; Seeing through tears II; ‘Complicated woe’: British military art of the 1790s; All the news that’s fit to paint; Disgusting objects; images of wounding in the aftermath of war; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies in the School of English at the University of Leicester, UK. His publications include Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002) and, as editor, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793-1822 (2000).
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