THE CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN SOCIETY

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

CIRCLES AND CIRCULATION IN THE REVOLUTIONARY

ATLANTIC WORLD OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

 

New York University, New York City

October  21-23, 2004

 

Keynote Speakers:

Nancy Ruttenburg and Sam Otter

 

The Charles Brockden Brown Society is pleased to announce its fourth biennial conference, to be held October 21-23, 2004 at New York University in New York City. Keynote speakers include Nancy Ruttenburg, chair of the comparative literature department at New York University and author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford, 1998), and Sam Otter, Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Melville’s Anatomies (California, 1999). The conference theme is “Circles and Circulation in the Revolutionary Atlantic World of Charles Brockden Brown,” which responds to recent scholarship centered on such circum-Atlantic phenomena as slavery and European and U. S. nation and empire building, as well as new paradigms emanating from such richly diverse areas of study as the history of the book, material culture, and theater and performance studies.  Such methodologies individually and collectively vivify revolutionary ways to apprehend the Revolutionary circles and circulation of late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic World writers, artists, and intellectuals; human, animal, and inanimate bodies; literary, artistic and cultural artifacts; and dominant, residual and emergent knowledges and their production.

 

Charles Brockden Brown is situated alternately at the center and margins of such circles and circulation.  Writer, critic, and editor; novelist, historian, and lawyer, Brown was a fervid producer and consumer of artifacts and ideas crisscrossing the Atlantic from the realms of art and literature, science and medicine, politics and history, and law and business.  Conference organizers invite abstracts for papers that interrogate the specific works, bodies, and objects of circulation among Brown and other authors, artists and intellectuals of his contemporary moment. 500-word abstracts are welcome via electronic submission; please send to Sean X. Goudie at sx.goudie@vanderbilt.edu and Michael Cody at codym@etsu.edu by May 15, 2004.