CfP: Feeling in the Long Nineteenth Century

Romance, Revolution, and Reform Conference

Cambridge, UK, 13-14th January 2023

Since increased critical attention paid to ‘affect’ in the 1990s, studies of the experience of feeling have grown exponentially across a range of disciplines. As various emotions historians have shown, passions, feelings, emotions, sentiments and affections were equally at the forefront of the minds of nineteenth-century thinkers from Wordsworth to Darwin. This international, interdisciplinary conference will explore how these contemporary and modern affective debates have impacted, and continue to impact, the ways in which we think about feeling.

Papers of 10-15 mins are invited on feeling in the broadest sense (‘to perceive or be affected by’, OED v.1a), in or about the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). We welcome papers from disciplines across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and from scholars at any stage in their academic careers.

Possible topics may include:

• Terminology and language of feeling
• Radical and transgressive feelings
• Mind vs Body; modes of perception
• Sensation and the senses
• Medical feelings and pathology
• Affect theories; phenomenology
• The aesthetics and poetics of feeling
• Communities of feeling; affective networks
• Nonhuman affects; ecological feelings
• Ugly feelings and unfeeling
• Writerly and readerly feelings
• Intuition; supernatural feelings
• New frameworks for feeling
• The limits of affect

Confirmed keynote speakers are Professor Rachel Ablow (University at Buffalo) and Professor Thomas Dixon (Queen Mary). 

Abstracts (250 words) and bios (75 words) should be submitted to rrr@soton.ac.uk by 23:59, 6th November 2022. Submissions should be formatted in Word and attached to the email; please include your full name, discipline, and any institutional affiliations in your submission.

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