CFP Technologies of Print and Dynamics of Power in the Age of Revolution

post by prof. Elizabeth Amann (UGent):

CALL FOR PAPERS Technologies of Print and Dynamics of Power in the Age of Revolution 

The U4 network ‘Reverberations of Revolution: Political Upheaval Seen from Afar (1750-1850)’ invites proposals for the symposium Technologies of Print and Dynamics of Power in the Age of Revolution, which will be held at Groningen University on 17 and 18 September 2015. The goal of the U4 network, which held its first meeting at Uppsala University in September 2014, is to explore how writers, artists and intellectuals responded to and represented revolutions taking place in other parts of the world in a variety of genres—novels, essays, poetry, spectacles, art works, journalism, caricatures, everyday objects, historiography and lifewriting—and how discussions of these uprisings influenced domestic political discourse and debate. 

The second meeting of the U4 network will focus on the role that print, publishing and dissemination played in the Age of Revolution. The bourgeois public sphere that emerged in this era hinged on new media (newspapers, magazines, novels), new readers (the middle class), and new discursive arenas (printers’ shops, as well as coffee-houses, salons, Tischgesellschaften). Scholars have predominantly represented these transformations as a democratizing force. It is important to recognize, however, that they involved sociopolitical exclusions as well. We invite contributions that challenge a narrowly technological definition of distribution media and explore them instead as complex cultural products. Individual submissions may seek to investigate the following research areas, among others: 

• The cross-fertilization of revolutionary ideas across borders through the medium of print technology
• The convergence of printers, writers and readers in specific revolutionary communities 

• The role of print capitalism in containing and spreading revolutionary ideas 

• Corresponding societies and the creation of a political subject 

• The role of plagiarism and piracy in promoting or preventing revolution 

• Print technology and the limits of political reform 

• Printing and the dynamics of the public sphere 

Proposals for individual paper submissions should consist of an abstract (max. 250 words) and a short CV. Please submit all proposals to Wil Verhoeven (U. of Groningen, wil.verhoeven[at]rug.nl). Deadline: April 15, 2015 (notifications of acceptance will follow a month later). 

The inaugural meeting of the U4 took place at Uppsala University on 22 September 2014 and focused on questions of democracy and popular sovereignty. The third conference of the U4 network will take place at the University of Göttingen in the Spring of 2016. The subject will be: ‘Translation and Transformation in the Age of Revolution’. The fourth and final conference of the U4 network will take place in the Fall of 2016 at Ghent University. The subject will be: ‘The Power of Things: Revolutionary Objects, Icons and Images Across Borders’.