From Richard Hakluyt's call for English planting in the “unsettled” parts of America to Bishop Berkeley's “westward the course of empire takes its way” and Andrew Burnaby's “empire is travelling westward”, to Thomas Jefferson's “empire of liberty” and the years of “manifest destiny”, the notion of empire has shaped political and geographical concepts of British North America, and then of the United States. As evidenced in Amy Kaplan's and Donald Pease's 1994 book Cultures of Imperialism, or in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989 The Empire Writes Back, David Armitage's Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), and Ralph Bauer's The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, and Modernity (2003), this notion has also spawned rich critical and theoretical analysis in recent years.
The title of the conference borrows from François Weil’s and Peter J. Kastor’s 2009 book Empires of the Imagination. Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase. The European Early American Studies Association (EEASA) board invites historians and specialists of art history, literature, music and theatre for a transdisciplinary reconsideration of “empire” in early North America, but also in the Caribbean, by bringing together “empire” and “imagination”.
What role did representation and vision (political, iconographic, musical) play in the construction of empire? What kinds of alternative visions of empire did politicians, authors and artists offer? How did metropolises conceive of empires? What kind of administrative imaginary was molded through the experience of governing an empire? And how did colonial outposts frame their own vision, how did they inject their ideas into prevailing metropolitan frameworks, and did they manage to do so? How did natives conceive of the newcomers? What kind of future together did all groups, whites, blacks and reds, envision? And did they? Under which conditions? How did competing imaginaries confront each other in the public sphere of politics, government and administration? Why did some prevail? To what extent were literary representations of the United States in the nineteenth century “imperial” and/or “post-colonial”?
Beyond this very global theme, EEASA remains an opportunity for all European and North American (and others) specialists of Early America to present research in progress. The conference will thus be open to all scholars who want to confront their current work to the questioning of fellow participants and panelists. EEASA welcomes applications on all periods of American and Atlantic history, from the Columbian encounter to the Civil War.
A specific half-day session will be devoted to the presentation of graduate students’ work.
Send a one-page CV and a one-page abstract to the conference program committee by September 1, 2011.
The EEASA program committee is made up of:
Prof. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, University Paris Diderot, current EEASA chair
Prof. Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne, past EEASA chair
Prof. Zbigniew Mazur, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin
Dr. Simon Middleton, University of Sheffield
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/cas/eeasa/
They will inform you of their decision by December 31, 2011. The address you should send the papers to is : EEASA2012@gmail.com
Bayreuth, 2012 EEASA Conference Location
The conference will be held at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.
http://www.bifas.uni-bayreuth.de/de/index.html
http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/index.html
http://www.bayreuth.de/english/tourist_information_357.html
It will be hosted by the Bayreuth Institute for American Studies (BIFAS), the Chairs of Early Modern History (Prof Susanne Lachenicht), American Studies and Intercultural Anglophone Studies (Prof Dr. Sylvia Mayer) and North American Studies (Prof Jeanne Cortiel) and Dr. Knut Holtsträter (Research Institute for Music Theater Studies).
To reach Bayreuth you can either fly into Munich, Frankfurt/Main or Nuremberg international airports. From there, you will have to take the train to Bayreuth. Tickets for trains can be booked through http://www.bahn.de. Bayreuth is three and a half hours from Frankfurt/Main, two hours from Munich by train, or one hour from Nuremberg (by train).
Hotel rooms can be booked (reduced tariff: € 65-85) at
http://www.hotel-lohmuehle.de/englisch/information.htm
or
http://www.anker-bayreuth.de/index.php?de_hotel
When booking your room, please let the hotel know that you are booking one of the rooms reserved for the EEASA meeting (special price for university guests).
Further information about the EEASA 2012 meeting is available on:
http://www.fruehe-neuzeit.uni-bayreuth.de/de/research/EEASA2012/index.html
and on
http://www.bifas.uni-bayreuth.de/de/research/conferences/index.html