BARS Blog

23-26 June 2022, Monte Verità conference center, Ascona, Switzerland

(initially planned for 2020 but delayed due to the pandemic)

Keynote Speakers: Christoph Bode, Biancamaria Fontana, Paul Hamilton, and Nicola Moorby

British Romanticism is part of European Romanticism and British writers drew inspiration from personal and cultural links with mainland Europe as well as the many forms of Continental travel. This international conference will explore the manifold relations between Britain and Europe during the Romantic period, taking advantage of recent work on transnational circulations and exchanges and a growing interest in comparative methodology. The conference will question stereotypes of Great Britain as insular by highlighting the island-nation’s European identity and its participation in a pan-European Romanticism shaped by transnational cultural dialogue and the cross-fertilization of art forms and disciplines. The aim is to uncover the channels and mechanisms by which Romantic ideas and influences were conveyed across national and disciplinary boundaries and to examine the role of individuals, communities and institutions in this complex transmission process. As well as directing attention to the often-overlooked international dimension of British Romanticism, the conference aims, by bringing together scholars working in Britain and on mainland Europe, to help develop the expanding research network on European Romanticism. Held at Monte Verità, an international conference centre in Ascona in the Swiss canton of Ticino which was formerly the site of a utopian community attracting intellectuals from across Europe, the conference will be divided between plenary lectures, invited panels, and open panel sessions. There will also be a public lecture on J.M.W. Turner and the Italian Lakes, as well as an excursion to Lake Como.

To fill the open panel sessions, we invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the conference topic, including:

• European Romantic networks
• Romantic mediations and mediating figures 
• Romantic salons, communities, and constellations
• Romantic disseminations and circulations
• Romantic theories of ‘Europe’
• European Romantic politics
• European Romantic aesthetics
• Romantic Europhobia and Europhilia
• Romantic exile and displacement
• British relations with Northern, Southern, and Eastern Romanticisms
• British Romanticism and Continental philosophy
• British Romanticism and Continental science 
• British Romanticism and European travel
• Britain’s Four Nations and Europe

We encourage junior scholars from mainland Europe to apply, and in order to cut down on carbon emissions, urge attendees to travel by train.

Abstracts of approximately 250 words are due by 1 March 2022. Please send abstracts to patrick.vincent@unine.ch

Conference site here.

Organizing committee:

                     Patrick Vincent, University of Neuchâtel

                     David Duff, Queen Mary University of London

                    Simon Swift, University of Geneva

How did atheist, secularist, and humanist ideas circulate within and across nations in the long nineteenth century? This conference seeks to consider this question at both micro and macro scales, exploring the local, national, and international networks that enabled freethought to flourish. The nineteenth century was a period during which developments across physical and social sciences, politics and activism, technology and travel gave rise to new ways of conceiving the universe and humanity’s place within it. While it is abundantly clear that this did not lay an uncomplicated path towards secularisation, there were many individuals who through their lives, writings, and actions sought to establish a secular age.

The question of terminology is often fraught and, as Nathan Alexander (2019) observes, the terms used to frame the field of historical unbelief can often serve to reinscribe particularly Western concerns. Although the category of freethinker (or Freidenker, libre-penseurs, fritänkare etc.) is not exempt from such difficulties, we use it is a multivalent term that speaks more broadly to the freedom of thought, speech, and action that liberation from religious frameworks can instil. Furthermore, it was used in the nineteenth century to encompass a range of positions, from militant, antagonistic atheists to those with pantheist and deist beliefs that sit outside traditional religious frameworks, via many forms of doubt and agnosticism.

There has been a tendency for Anglophone freethought to be considered separately from European traditions, and both are often cut off from, and can overshadow, wider global currents. Recently, significant steps have been taken in making connections across such boundaries through edited collections such as the internationally orientated Cambridge History of Atheism, ed. by Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse (2021), and Freethinkers in Europe: National and Transnational Secularities, 1789−1920s, ed. by Carolin Kosuch (2020). This conference builds upon such publications, and as such we warmly welcome proposals which explore how freethought discourses in the period c.1789–1914 operated on a global scale, and how the legacies of these persisted across the twentieth century and through to the present.

This will be a multidisciplinary conference, with contributions welcomed from those working in the fields of history, literature, art history, politics, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, law, media studies and so on. Topics might include, but are not limited to: 

·      Blasphemy, heresy and iconoclasm

·      Class and sociocultural divides

·      Deism, pantheism, and alternative theist traditions

·      Freethinking communities and societies

·      Freethought and gender

·      Freethought press and popular media

·      Freethought spaces and practices

·      Freethought, the state, and the law

·      Global and transnational networks and exchanges

·      Humanism

·      Morality and ethics

·      Race and empire

·      Radicalism and militancy

·      Science and freethought

·      Sex and relationships

·      Socialism and communism

·      The art, literature, and music of freethought

·      The conceptual history of unbelief

·      The legacies of nineteenth-century freethought

The conference will be held on Friday 9 and Saturday 10 September 2022 at Queen Mary University of London. It is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and organised in partnership with the International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism and Humanism and Humanists UK. 

Please submit a 300-word proposal for a 15-minute paper plus a 50-word biography in Word format to c.stainthorp@qmul.ac.uk by Tuesday 1 March 2022. We are also interested in proposals for panels or presenting work in alternative formats, please get in contact directly to discuss these prior to submission.

Organisers: Clare Stainthorp (Queen Mary University of London), with Anton Jansson (University of Gothenburg) and Madeleine Goodall (Humanists UK)