Call for Papers: Communities, Relationships, and Networks in the Long Nineteenth Century

A one-day PGR and ECR interdisciplinary conference, hosted by LNCSS-Graduate Strand

Saturday 19th February 2022 at Senate House, London

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ruth Livesey, Royal Holloway, University of London

The restrictions imposed by the global pandemic have highlighted the fundamental human need for interconnection, community membership, and participation in wider society. With nineteenth-century citizens denied the disparate modes of interactions and mobility enjoyed in modern life, this conference seeks to uncover the ways in which nineteenth-century people engendered, facilitated and valued human connection, whether it be through written words, technological inventions or the exchange of material things. In doing so, its aim is to explore the diverse nature of nineteenth-century communities, relationships and networks.

We welcome proposals for ten or twenty-minute papers examining all types of nineteenth-century communities, relationships and networks. Papers might consider the creation and consolidation of networks and human bonds in social, emotional, nurturing, moral, ethnic, or religious terms, together with the modes of connection, and the sharing of knowledge, information, memories, traditions, resources, values, or agendas.

Proposals are invited for 10 or 20-minute papers on the following topics, but are not limited to:

• Transnational, national, global, and provincial communities
• Collective aspects of identity, citizenship and settlement
• Forgotten, hidden, new, and migrated communities
• Transnational experiences associated with exploration, Empire, the postcolonial, the diaspora
• Metropolitan street communities including streetwalkers and criminal factions
• Entertainment and social gatherings and encounters (the tavern, club, concert, dance hall, hotel, exhibitions, museums, demonstrations) 
• Hobby groups and clubs
• Place nostalgia and emotional connection to home, nation, freedom, family, friends
• Family, courtship and marriage 
• The material culture of connectedness (such as letters, carte de visites, hair jewellery)
• Shared possessions
• Gifting cultures, holidays and traditions
• Technologies intended to facilitate human connection

Proposals should be up to 300 words and submitted with a brief CV by 13/12/21 to: lncssgs@gmail.com Please state if you wish to present for 10 or 20 minutes.