Romantic Infrastructures
University of Hamburg, Warburg-Haus, 30 September–3 October 2027
Organisers: Ute Berns and Sandra Dinter
Keynote Speakers:
Claire Connolly (University College Cork), Peter Maw (University of Leeds),
Michele Speitz (Furman University)
Infrastructure – manifesting in roads, transport systems, energy supply systems, waste
management, and information and communication networks – is integral to the
organisation of modern societies. While infrastructures have often been presented as
mere physical and functional structures ‘below’ or ‘underneath’ (infra) a society, recent
research in anthropology, political science, science and technology studies, cultural
history, and environmental and energy humanities has complicated this view, with
Lauren Berlant even speaking of infrastructure as “the living mediation of what
organizes life” (2016). For example, scholars now emphasise that infrastructures both
shape and are shaped by economic and political power, structure cultural practices,
transform non-human ecologies, and require not only construction but also ongoing
maintenance.
Although the term infrastructure was not yet in use, the Romantic period deserves
scholarly attention in this context, as it witnessed both the modification of existing
infrastructures and the ‘promise’ (Anand et.al. 2018) and development of new ones. Key
transitions such as the introduction of steam-powered transportation;the improvement
of the postal service and mail coaches;the construction of canals, bridges, and dams; the
macadamisation of public roads; and the rise of the tourism and hospitality industry
reconfigured the material, social, and cultural landscape. Romantic writers and artists
engaged with these developments, imbuing infrastructures with meaning and
mediating affective, critical, and speculative responses to them, not least by drawing on
aesthetic discourse (‘sublime’, ‘picturesque’ etc.). While contributions by Miranda
Burgess (2010), Michele Speitz (2024), and Daniel E. White (2024) have introduced the
concept of infrastructure into Romantic studies, much remains to be explored. This
conference seeks to provide a forum for investigating the multiple dimensions of
Romantic infrastructures.
Drawing on Brian Larkin’s deliberately broad and inclusive definition of
infrastructure as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and
allow for their exchange over space” (2013, 328), we invite 20-minute contributions that
address but are, of course, not limited to the following aspects:
– Infrastructures (i.e. substructures) as a representational challenge: questions of
habit and in/visibility; novelty and scale
– Representations of social equity and inequity associated with or perpetuated by
infrastructure (e.g. impacts along lines of gender, sexuality, race, and class)
– Visual and verbal representations of infrastructures’ entanglement with non-
human nature
– Representations of infrastructures in the context of empire and colonialism
– Depictions of infrastructures as enabling mobility and tourism in travel literature
– Political and cultural representations of infrastructures shaping concepts of
progress
– Crises, breakdowns and disruptions of infrastructures (e.g. accidents, war, natural
disasters): representational affordances and modes of modelling
– Infrastructures catalysing philosophical inquiry (e.g. regarding experience and
agency, as well as human and planetary history)
– Spatio-temporal qualities of infrastructures in relation to literary and cultural
form (e.g. traces of the past (recent, medieval, Roman), visions of the future,
changing rhythms and accelerations, non-synchronicity
– Cultural appreciations of infrastructures’ roles and impacts on knowledge
economies
– Infrastructures supporting cultural and literary production (e.g. publishing,
libraries, literary societies, academies of the arts and sciences)
Please send proposals of 300-500 words and a short biographical note to both local
organisers by 15 January 2027: Ute Berns (ute.berns@uni-hamburg.de) and Sandra
Dinter (sandra.dinter@uni-hamburg.de).
Link to GER website: https://www.englische-romantik.de/
———
Ralf Haekel