INCS conference paper deadline nears

Skidmore and Bard colleges will host the Interdisciplinary 19th-Century Studies (INCS) 2009 annual conference April 24-26, 2009 on the Skidmore campus. Keynote speakers are the following:
Robert Frank, Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management at Cornell University; Darrin McMahon, Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University; and Adam Potkay, Margaret L. Hamilton Professor of English at the College of William and Mary.

Following on INCS's 2008 theme, ?The Emergence of Human Rights,? this conference will focus on ?the pursuit of happiness,? that elusive corollary to life and liberty. What form did happiness and the comprehension of happiness take in the 19th century? How, for example, did the legacy of the American and French revolutions shape 19th-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 19th-century contexts and genealogies for such work. In acknowledgment of our 2009 conference location, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., we particularly encourage papers exploring Victorian pleasure-seeking as having provided popular, if contested, routes to happiness.

Topics may include:
Luxury and pleasure in a democratic republic; wealth; leisure; beauty and art; speculation (gambling, chance); family, friendship, and love;
recreation; rights and liberties; leisure; virtue and working for the good of others; health, spas, and hygiene; the cultivation of emotions; shopping/consumer desire; vacations/travel; misery and the absence of happiness, and pain, the opposite of pleasure; architecture of happiness; 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. Please send 200-word abstracts by Oct. 15, 2008, to dalberti@bard.edu

Selected conference papers will be published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts,the journal of the INCS. Click here for more information on INCS .