"Boston and the New Atlantic World"

The 7th Biennial Symbiosis Conference

June 25-28, 2009

Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts

Plenary speakers:
Richard Brantley (University of Florida)
Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia)
Mark Peterson (University of California, Berkeley)

In honor of Boston’s "New World" past and in recognition of its central role in what William
Boelhower has called the "new Atlantic studies matrix," the 2009 Symbiosis conference
committee is delighted to invite participation in a three-day conference, "Boston and the New
Atlantic World." Aiming to capitalize on the tremendous wealth of current scholarship on
transatlantic subjects as well as to work on bridging the disciplinary gap between scholars of
Atlantic literature and history, this conference will gather participants on the Suffolk University
campus on Boston’s Beacon Hill, within striking distance of the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage
Trail, the Boston Athenaeum, the Museum of African American History, and other sites of great
Atlantic significance.

We invite proposals for panels and individual papers that engage a variety of transatlantic and/or
transnational topics in the literatures and cultural histories of the Atlantic world. Papers that
treat Boston as a site of Atlantic cultural exchange are especially welcome, although the
conference is certainly not limited to local concerns. Submissions are encouraged from scholars
of literary history from the early modern period to the present. Possible topics for panels and/or
papers might include the following:

- European visions of the New World
- transcultural encounters around the Atlantic rim
- linguistic exchange and translation
- transatlantic religious experiments and institutions
- Atlantic revolutions (United States: 1776, France: 1789, Haiti: 1791, Europe: 1848)
- Atlantic utopianism (American colonies, Pantisocratic dreams, Fourierist communities, Liberian
settlement)
- Atlantic genres (slave and captivity narratives, travel journals, ship’s logs, sermons, theatrical
performances, epistolary novels, personal letters, newspaper dispatches)
- transatlantic publishing (literary reception and reputation, reviews and puffs, international
editions and copyright disputes)
- transatlantic cultural celebrities
- transnational literary friendships, collaborations, and currents of influence
- artistic movements that crossed and recrossed the Atlantic (such as Romanticism and
modernism)
- figures of the Black Atlantic (Wheatley, Equiano, Douglass, Brown, Delany, Jacobs, Wright,
Baldwin, and others)
- transatlantic abolitionism (lecture tours, conventions, antislavery periodicals)
- competing nativist, nationalist, and cosmopolitan interests
- transamerican and hemispheric Atlantic studies: literary connections between the cultures of
Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 1-page CV as Microsoft Word attachments to Leslie
Eckel (leckel_at_suffolk.edu) by the deadline of January 10, 2009. Inquiries are welcome before
then.

For more information about "Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations," please
visit http://www.symbiosisonline.org.uk/

A conference website is under construction. Details will be announced soon.

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Received on Fri Oct 03 2008 - 20:19:43 EDT