Nineteenth-Century Global Cities and Urban Worlds: An International Symposium

Opening remarks by
Christian Henriot, Aix-Marseille University (France)

Keynote Speakers
Susan Zieger, University of California, Riverside (USA)
Patrick Le Galès, Sciences Po (France)
Michael Goebel, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany)

Twenty years ago, Richard L. Stein speculated that the city, as a research subject, may be appealing to scholars specifically because of the ‘demand’ it places on any single discipline ‘to borrow’ from others. In this respect, the city often serves as ‘a perfect interdisciplinary object’. At the same time, researchers in varied disciplines, often motivated by distinct interests and concerns, ask different kinds of questions about cities, urbanization, and urban life. For its second international symposium, the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, in conjunction with TELEMMe (Temps, espaces, langages, Europe méridionale, Méditerranée) and the Institut de recherches asiatiques, invites proposals on the theme of ‘Nineteenth-Century Global Cities and Urban Worlds’ from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives. Topics for individual paper and preconstituted panel proposals may include (but are not limited to):

-Cities as sites of international and transnational transfer and exchange
-Relationship of cities to political ideologies, movements, and cultural forms
-Transnational linkages in urban planning and suburbanization
-Realist fiction and the city
-Histories of indigenous urbanization
-Policing cities
-Port cities (gateways, hubs) and the urban spaces of which they were part
-Spectacle and sartorial display in urban settings
-Urban Romanticisms
-Painting, art markets, and urban worlds
-Cities and global migration
-Housing, sanitation, and hygiene
-Spaces of leisure (clubs, bathhouses, restaurants, theatre, cinema, museums)
-Comparative urbanization
-Urban religious communities
-City games: Sport and urban space
-Colonial cities
-Subterranean spaces
-Queer geographies of cities
-Urban infrastructure, layout, architecture, and transportation
-Clock time in urban contexts
-Urban types (the flâneur, the malandro, the dandy, the chica moderna)
-Cities and early cinema culture
-Gothic global cities / urban gothic
-Cosmopolitan dreamscapes
-Fictitious cities
-Urban efficiencies
-Relationships among translocal, transurban, and transnational
-Cities as birthplaces of literary avant gardes
-Creole cities
-Soundscapes of global cities (music halls, opera houses)
-Cities and state power
-Urban topography and affective life
-Global south cities today: resurrections of (as Mike Davis argues) nineteenth-century Dublin, Naples, or London’s East End?
-Transnational exchange (traveling theatre, exhibitions, book tours)
-Global cities as sites of transnational spectacle and consumption (department stores, world fairs)
-High culture, popular culture, and cities
-Global cities, urbanization, and environmental crises
-City poems in a globalizing age

Proposals
Individual paper proposals should consist of an abstract (200-250 words), brief biography (80- 100 words), and full contact information in a single pdf or Word file. Panel proposals should include abstracts for 3-4 papers, a brief rationale that connects the papers (100-200 words), and biographies of each participant (80-100 words) in a single pdf or Word file. Successful panel proposals will include participants from more than one institution, and, ideally, represent a mix of disciplines/fields and career stages. Although the working language of the conference is English, a limited number of slots will be available for presentations in French. Proposal deadline: 15 September.

Schedule
The conference will take place online (6 June) and in person (7-8 June). Online panels are reserved for those with limited mobility, including caregivers, postgraduate students without institutional support, the immunocompromised, and the contingently employed as well as scholars from the global south. Please indicate in your proposal whether, if your paper is accepted, you require a virtual slot. The in-person plenaries and panels will be held at Aix-Marseille University, Schuman campus.

Presenters must be current members of the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies. For more information on the Society, visit www.global19c.com. For more information about the symposium, please visit its dedicated website: https://www.sgncs-symposia.com/. Proposals and questions should be directed to the Program Committee: societygncs@gmail.com.