Enfilade

From the conference website:

Persistent Spaces: Politics, Aesthetics and Topography
in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century City
Université Paris Diderot, 12–13 December 2013

Keynote speakers: Lynda Nead (Birkbeck College) and Stéphane Van Damme (Sciences Po Paris)

The aim of this two-day postgraduate conference is to bring together young researchers to explore the city and its ideologies from a fully interdisciplinary perspective. We would like to combine approaches from the fields of literature and the arts, sociology, philosophy, law, science and engineering in order to create a dialogue between disciplines and methodologies. This conference would also establish a dialogue between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. We will seek to highlight the individual specificities of these two periods, but also to understand the echoes, continuities and breaks between them. From the Enlightenment to the late nineteenth century and before urbanism was fully established as a discipline, the city was constantly being configured and reconfigured by the joint influences of architects, civil engineers, political organizations, associations and the informal “practices” of inhabitants. Writers and artists also played a major part in this process, both picking up on these developments and changing them through the aesthetics they deployed. We would like to study this topography of struggle. The conference will shed light on the city as a site of conflicting and interpenetrating layers, changing yet also persisting through time and space, and continually shaped by tensions between authority and resistance.

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9.00  Registration, welcome, plenary address by Sara Thornton, Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Cultural Studies, Université Paris Diderot

9.30  Panel 1: Urbanism and urban planning
Chair: Allan Potofsky, Professor of Eighteenth-Century History, Université Paris Diderot
• Simona Gîrleanu (Université de Marne-la-Vallée), ‘Capitals of the Enlightenment: London and Paris Improved’
• Yvonne Rickert (Philipps University of Marburg), ‘The Parisian “Place Louis XV”: The Effect of a Literary Clash on the Architectural Design’

10.30  Tea

11.00  Panel 2: Urban Experiences of poverty and pauperism
Chair: Ariane Fennetaux, Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century Cultural Studies, Université Paris Diderot
• Oliver Betts (University of York), ‘Disorderly Spaces: Homes in the Slums of London and Paris’
• George Currie (Queen Mary University of London), ‘Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Carlyle and Urban Pauperism’

12.00  Lunch

14.00  Panel 3: Instability of space, instability of self
Chair: Estelle Murail, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Cultural Studies, Université Paris-Diderot
• Alexandra Logvinova (European Humanities University), ‘The Structure of Urban Daily Life in the Nineteenth Century as the Basis of Subject’s Anxiety’
• Adrian Versteegh (New York University), ‘“Cycle in Epicycle, Orb in Orb”: Navigating the Thresholds, Passages and Nested Interiors of Nineteenth-Century Urban Literature’

15.00  Tea

15.30  Panel 4: Fragmented spaces and writing
Chair: Lynda Nead, Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London
• Alison Annunziata (University of Southern California), ‘Urban De-Enlightenment: A Russian’s Dark Journey through Paris and London at the Start of the French Revolution’
• Ushashi Dasgupta (St John’s College, University of Oxford), ‘“Is this an Hotel? Are There Thieves in the House?”: Dickens, Collins, and the Spatial Contexts of Crime’
• Robert Yeates (University of Exeter), ‘The Destruction of the City in Early Science Fiction’

17.00  Keynote address
Stéphane Van Damme, Professor of History of Science, European University Institute in Florence, ‘Archaeology of Modernity: Making Metropolitan Past Tangible and Persistent: Paris, London, New York’

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9.30  Ariane Fennetaux (Université Paris Diderot), ‘Materializing History: Plebeian Women’s Pockets in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century London’

10.30  Tea

11.00  Panel 5: Disorientating the Orient
Chair: Colin Jones, Professor of Eighteenth-Century French History, Queen Mary College, London, Fellow of the British Academy
• Michael Talbot (University of St Andrews), ‘Shifting Centres: The Political and Topographical Transformations of Ottoman Haifa, 1700–1900’
• Natalia Starostina (Emory University), ‘Paris Oriental, Carnal Pleasures and the Spaces of Desires in Defining the Mental Topography of Paris from Montesquieu to Maupassant and to Paul Morand’

12.00  Lunch

14.00  Panel 6: The city in science
Chair: Stéphane Van Damme, Professor of History of Science, European University Institute in Florence
• Lavinia Maddluno (University of Cambridge), ‘Spaces of Nature and Realms of Civilisation: Pavia between Politics, Scientific Practices and Natural Order in the Late Eighteenth Century’
• Mathieu Fernandez (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers), ‘Mapping the Third Dimension: Observing, Representing and Transforming Paris, 1750–1850’

15.00  Tea

15.30  Keynote address
Lynda Nead, Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, ‘The Tiger in the Smoke: The Fog of Modernity in Post-war London’