SPEAKING NATURE

How did the nineteenth century conceive, construct, and represent the physical world? In what ways did nature as an ideology and/or material reality shape the nineteenth century? How did the nineteenth century understand the relation of human beings to nature?

The 2011 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Conference invites proposals that investigate any aspect of this topic from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, including and/or integrating Literature, History, Science, Art History, Environmental Studies, Law, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Music, Economics, and Theology.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• human nature
• animal nature
• plant nature
• gender & nature
• empire & nature
• anatomy, medicine, health
• Nature's language
• laws of nature
• environmentalism & sustainability
• natural disasters & catastrophes
• natural frontiers
• wilderness & gardens
• cities & ruins
• violent /nurturing nature
• new worlds, lost worlds, our world
• landscapes, oceans, deserts
• conquest of nature
• nature & antiquity
• nature & art
• nature & technology
• nature & the sciences
• nature & human responsibility
• nature & the disciplines

Please submit 250-word abstracts by November 1, 2010 to incs2011@pitzer.edu or to sumangala_bhattacharya@pitzer.edu.

The conference will be held at Pitzer College, a member of the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, Californa.

For more information on INCS, see www.nd.edu/~incshp/. Selected conference papers will be published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts.