UPDATE: [Ethnic] Symbiosis 2009: Boston and the New Atlantic World (due 2/20/09; for 6/25-6/28/09)

full name / name of organization: 
Leslie Eckel
contact email: 

"Boston and the New Atlantic World"

The 7th Biennial Symbiosis Conference

June 25-28, 2009

Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts

Plenary speakers:
Richard Brantley (University of Florida)
Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia)
Mark Peterson (University of California, Berkeley)

* NEW deadline for proposals: February 20, 2009 *

* NEW conference website: http://blogs.cas.suffolk.edu/symbiosis2009/ *
Please see website for details about conference location and accommodation options.

In honor of Boston’s "New World" past and in recognition of its central role in what William
Boelhower has called the "new Atlantic studies matrix," the 2009 Symbiosis conference
committee is delighted to invite participation in a three-day conference, "Boston and the New
Atlantic World." Aiming to capitalize on the tremendous wealth of current scholarship on
transatlantic subjects as well as to work on bridging the disciplinary gap between scholars of
Atlantic literature and history, this conference will gather participants on the Suffolk University
campus on Boston’s Beacon Hill, within striking distance of the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage
Trail, the Boston Athenaeum, the Museum of African American History, and other sites of great
Atlantic significance.

We invite proposals for panels and individual papers that engage a variety of transatlantic and/or
transnational topics in the literatures and cultural histories of the Atlantic world. Papers that
treat Boston as a site of Atlantic cultural exchange are especially welcome, although the
conference is certainly not limited to local concerns. Submissions are encouraged from scholars
of literary history from the early modern period to the present. Possible topics for panels and/or
papers might include the following:

- European visions of the New World
- transcultural encounters around the Atlantic rim
- episodes of linguistic exchange, creolization, and translation
- Atlantic radicalism, rebellion, and revolution (United States: 1776, France: 1789, Haiti: 1791,
Europe: 1848)
- Atlantic utopias and dystopias (American colonies, Pantisocratic dreams, Fourierist
communities, Liberian settlement)
- Atlantic genres (slave and captivity narratives, travel journals, ship’s logs, sermons, theatrical
performances, epistolary novels, personal letters, newspaper dispatches)
- figures of the black Atlantic (Wheatley, Cugoano, Equiano, Douglass, Brown, Delany, Jacobs, Du
Bois, Wright, Baldwin, Hughes, Condé, Marshall, and others)
- transamerican and hemispheric Atlantic studies: literary connections between the cultures of
Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Central and South America
- flow patterns of Atlantic engagement with other oceans and seas: Arctic, Indian,
Mediterranean, Pacific
- transatlantic religious experiments and institutions
- transatlantic abolitionism (lecture tours, conventions, antislavery periodicals)
- transatlantic publishing (literary reception and reputation, reviews and puffs, international
editions and copyright disputes)
- transatlantic cultural celebrities
- transnational literary friendships, collaborations, and currents of influence
- tourists, pilgrims, migrants, sailors, pirates, ambassadors, expatriates, and exiles
- competing nativist, nationalist, and cosmopolitan interests
- artistic movements that crossed and recrossed the Atlantic (such as Romanticism and
modernism)

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 1-page CV as Microsoft Word attachments to Leslie
Eckel (leckel_at_suffolk.edu) by the deadline of February 20, 2009. Inquiries are welcome before
then.

For more information about Symbiosis, a journal of Anglo-American literary relations and
transatlantic studies, please visit http://www.symbiosisonline.org.uk/

The Symbiosis editors plan to feature selected papers from "Boston and the New Atlantic World"
in a special conference double issue of the journal to be released in late 2009-early 2010.

A prize for the most outstanding paper given by a graduate student at the conference (as judged
by members of the Symbiosis editorial board) will be awarded as well.

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Received on Wed Jan 07 2009 - 11:27:48 EST