We are pleased to invite proposals from UK-based postgraduate and early-career researchers to participate in a twelve-person, interdisciplinary research workshop, ‘Genres of Revolt: Cultural Afterlives of 1848’, to be held on 12-13 June 2025, at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge.

In the history of revolutions, 1848 has often stood as a marker of utopian aspirations—but also a symbol of thwarted hopes. More recently, vibrant scholarly debates on the significance of this crucial year have begun to prompt a new reckoning and to revise a longstanding consensus that the revolutions simply ‘failed’, in part by looking beyond the European scene alone.

This research workshop will build on such scholarship by exploring 1848’s powerful and vibrant afterlives in literary form and cultural production writ large. We will focus in particular on how 1848 propelled new experiments in imaginative writing and visual representations. How, we’ll ask, did a growing sense of national consciousness—and a felt need for a national literature—relate an equally powerful internationalist mindset, one often based on shared realities of oppression across national contexts? How did translation inflect existing literary and aesthetic forms and produce new ones? And how did the circulation of images, poems, and narratives on a mass scale contribute to notions of both connectivity and separateness between distant peoples and places? By exploring how figures across Europe and the Atlantic world took inspiration from the revolts to rethink the relation between art and politics, we also hope to uncover new ways of articulating the role of literature and culture in and as social protest.

We invite proposals for papers that address any aspect of the cultures of 1848, including, but not limited to, revolutionary history, visual cultures, feminist literature, radical journalism, and studies of race and empire across borders. We welcome speakers from a wide range of disciplines, including the history of art, modern languages, English, postcolonial studies, and other fields.

Travel and lodging in Cambridge are available for UK-based postgraduate and early-career researchers thanks to a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant. Speakers will join invited scholars to discuss work in progress, receive feedback, and eventually participate in discussions leading to the publication of an edited volume. To be considered, please send a proposal of up to 300 words, plus a short bio, to Victoria Baena (vb337@cam.ac.uk) by 20 December 2024.