Transpacific Prospects: Americans in Asia/Asians in America in Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies

If transatlanticism has been a staple of recent nineteenth-century American literary scholarship, the cultural and material traffic across the Pacific has continued to occupy a space on the margins of nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies. It is hard to imagine, however, a field richer in prospects for future study than the nineteenth-century encounter between the Americas and East, Southeast, South, Central, and West Asia. Proposals are solicited for a panel on the nineteenth-century exchange between Asia and the Americas. Emphases could include travel, tourism, immigration, diplomacy, empire, missionary narratives, inter-religious exchange and dialogue, trade, the role of Polynesia as a Pacific crossroads, education, literary influence, and visual representation. Please submit 250 word proposals and brief CVs with contact information by September 20, 2011 to Brian Yothers at byothers_at_utep.edu and Liam Corley at wccorley_at_csupomona.edu.