CALL FOR PAPERS: 

INTERDISCIPLINARY NINETEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES CONFERENCE

ÒThe Pursuit of HappinessÓ

Sponsored by Bard College and Skidmore College

Saratoga Springs, NY

April 24-26, 2009

Software: Microsoft Office

ÒÕHappiness our beingÕs end and aimÕ is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world.Ó

                        —Thomas Carlyle.

Following on INCSÕs 2008 theme, ÒThe Emergence of Human Rights,Ó this conference will focus on Òthe pursuit of happiness,Ó that elusive corollary to life and liberty. What form did happiness and the comprehension of happiness take in the nineteenth century? How, for example, did the legacy of the American and French Revolutions shape nineteenth-century understandings of happiness? What were the effects of burgeoning industrialism? In keeping with the recent turn to studies of emotion, feeling, and affect within literary studies as well as psychology, economics, history, and philosophy, we invite papers on the nineteenth-century contexts and genealogies for such work.  In acknowledgment of our 2009 conference location. Saratoga Springs, NY, we particularly encourage papers exploring Victorian pleasure-seeking as having provided popular, if contested, routes to happiness. 

 

Keynote Speakers

Robert Frank, Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management at Cornell University 

Darrin McMahon, Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University

Adam Potkay, Margaret L. Hamilton Professor of English at The College of William and Mary

 

Topics may include:

Luxury and pleasure in a democratic republic                                    Wealth

Leisure                                                                                      Beauty, art

Speculation (gambling, chance)                                                      Family, friendship, love

Recreation                                                                                  Rights, liberties

Leisure                                                                                      Virtue, working for the good of others

Health, spas, hygiene                                                                   The cultivation of emotions

Shopping / consumer desire                                                           Vacations / travel

Misery, the absence of happiness;                                                   Architecture of happiness

    and pain, the opposite of pleasure                                               Race, class gender and ethnic perspectives

INCS encourages interdisciplinary perspectives integrating:  Literature, Law, Political Science, Philosophy, Theology, History, Art History, History of Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Economics, Health Sciences.  200 word abstracts by October 15, 2008 to dalberti@bard.edu 

For more information on INCS see:  www.nd.edu/~incshp/

Selected conference papers published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts