Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS)

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) The Pursuit of Happiness

Dates: April 24-26, 2009
Call for Papers Deadline: October 15, 2008
Location: Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs
Website: www.nd.edu/~incshp/

Sponsored by Bard College and Skidmore College

Keynote Speakers:

Darrin McMahon, Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University and author of Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Books, 2006) and Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001)
Adam Potkay, Margaret L. Hamilton Professor of English at The College of William and Mary and author of The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism* (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Cornell University Press, 2000)

"Happiness our being's end and aim is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world." -- Thomas Carlyle

Following on the 2008 INCS theme, The Emergence of Human Rights, this conference will focus on the pursuit of happiness, that elusive corollary to life and liberty. What form did happiness and the comprehension of happiness take in the nineteenth century? How, for example, did the legacy of the American and French Revolutions shape nineteenth-century understandings of happiness? What were the effects of burgeoning industrialism? In keeping with the recent turn to studies of emotion, feeling, and affect within literary studies as well as psychology, economics, political studies, history, and philosophy, we invite papers on the nineteenth-century contexts and genealogies for such work. And, in acknowledgment of our 2009 conference location. Saratoga Springs, NY, we particularly encourage papers exploring Victorian pleasure-seeking as having provided popular, if contested, routes to happiness.

Topics may include:

Joy, luxury and pleasure in a democratic republic, wealth, leisure, beauty, art speculation (gambling, chance), family, friendship, love, recreation, rights, liberties, race, class, gender, and ethnic perspectives on happiness, virtue, working for the good of others, health, spas, hygiene, the cultivation of emotions, shopping/consumer desire, vacations/travel, misery, the absence of happiness, pain, the opposite of pleasure, and the architecture of happiness

INCS encourages interdisciplinary perspectives integrating: Literature, Law, Political Science, Philosophy, Theology, History, Art History, History of Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Economics, Health Sciences.

200 word abstracts by October 15, 2008 to Deirdre d'Albertis, Bard College via e-mail at: dalberti@bard.edu

For more information on INCS see: www.nd.edu/~incshp/

Selected conference papers published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts.