Call for Papers

Bloomsbury Cultural Histories Series

A Cultural History of Countercultures in the Long-Nineteenth Century

Volume Editors:

Rhi Johnson (Indiana University Bloomington)

Gabrielle Miller (Baylor University)

Although the term “counterculture” is a recent development, tracing back only to the 1970s, cultural

movements and ideals that reject established social values and practices, or that oppose traditional,

entrenched mores and expectations, have a much longer history. Indeed, many of the social transformations

associated with the modern era emerged from such challenges to the mainstream. Enlightenment thought

rejected blind faith in tradition, even as some reformers enacted harsh censorship while circulating their own

pornographic or heretical texts clandestinely. Romanticism elevated rebellion against social strictures, even

as it was leveraged as a tool of nation building. Bohemian circles challenged bourgeois class conventions and

norms around drug use, even as many bohemians benefitted from systemic societal privileges. Some

abolitionist and suffrage movements in nineteenth-century Europe and the Atlantic world contested both the

bourgeois model of the “angel of the hearth” and the developing pseudoscience used to justify enslavement,

racism, and, eventually, eugenics, even as other reformers worked within eugenic frameworks or fostered an

understanding of gender that, in many places, led women’s rights to be more restricted at the end of the

century than they were at its outset.

These and other countercultural formations provide the basis for this volume, which explores the emergence,

scope, and impact of countercultures, broadly understood, amid the consolidation of industrial modernity and

bourgeois hegemony in the long nineteenth century. We seek essays that examine the relationships between

dominant cultural forms, alternative ways of being, and interpretive frameworks that resisted, transgressed,

or rejected the mainstream. Did countercultures consistently develop in direct opposition to cultural norms?

How were they subsumed, assimilated, or rejected by dominant cultural actors? To what extent did cultural

practices, political movements, and aesthetic forms that departed from the norm transform the status quo?

This series understands countercultures as collective formations that, across historical periods, make

everyday life a site of transgressive refusal. Through alternative ways of living, believing, expressing,

organizing, and belonging, they challenge dominant norms and reveal the boundaries of the proper, sacred,

respectable, and legitimate as historically made, contested, and open to change; some remain fleeting

experiments, while others help make broader social transformation imaginable.

(Inter)disciplinary research essays in any field are welcome. Essays should speak to a broad, interdisciplinary

audience, and should respond to one of the following topic areas, within the context of the long nineteenth

century:

•Countercultural movements and their origins

•Rebels and poets

•Aesthetics and sounds

•Transgressive genders and sexualities

•Cults, drugs and rituals

•Hybrid identities at the crossroads

•Resistance and counterpublic spaces

•Culture wars

These topics are held in common across A Cultural History of Countercultures, so essays not aimed

specifically at one of these areas cannot be considered for inclusion in the volume.

A 250-word abstract and one-page CV are due by December 1, 2026, to rhirjohn@iu.edu. Full articles (max

10,000 words), if requested, will be due April 15, 2027. Please indicate in your abstract which topic area

your essay addresses. Submissions may not be under review or published elsewhere.