Ongoing public debate over politically charged public monuments reminds us how much is at stake in the shaping of cultural memory, whether through durable physical structures, portable or reproducible aesthetic works, or discursive representations. How were monumentality and the preservation of the past conceived in the nineteenth century? How might we reconceive our own ways of remembering the nineteenth century? We invite proposals for papers and panels that explore monuments in the broadest sense of the word—those from as well as those about the nineteenth century. We also welcome papers that consider the concepts of monumentality and/or memory as they pertain to humanistic disciplines and engage with nineteenth-century studies.

On the occasion of the Year of the Global at the University of Pittsburgh
The Department of French & Italian Presents:

Representations of Disaster
Call for Papers
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
March 8-9, 2019

Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Deborah Jenson
Professor of Romance Studies and Global Health
Duke University

Reading of Belle merveille by Poet and Novelist James Noël

We seek projects pertaining to health, sickness, and everything in between and at the extremes of these conditions that span and involve the Spanish-speaking and Lusophone worlds. Drawing on a variety of approaches, including but not limited to, biopolitics, necropolitics, spirituality and religion, queer studies, the history of medicine and epidemics, and affect theory, we invite you to consider the figure of the (g)host, regardless of your period of interest. Questions about the limits of the bodily and conceptualizations of liminality as well as interdisciplinary papers are of particular interest.