V21 Collective at INCS

V21 is delighted to announce its plenary session at the upcoming Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies conference on Natural and Unnatural Histories, “Towards a Strategic Presentism”, 11:00am Friday 11 March.

Friends, fans, and foes are invited to join affiliates for drinks at the V21 Moonlight Hour, Renaissance Hotel bar, 9:30pm Friday.

“Towards a Strategic Presentism”
Although “presentist” generally functions as a slur, this roundtable considers the possibilities for affirmative valences. “Presentist” might after all describe any number of historicist projects –from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, to pick just three– that, however incommensurate with one another, are all organized around some critique of forms of historical thinking solely committed to the past. In our own moment, “presentist” might name projects in postcritique and affect studies that explore the complexities of transtemporal attachment; it might name projects organized by “deep time” and concepts like “the anthropocene” insofar as these historical orientations are framed by long durées encompassing the present rather than by discrete periods sealed off from it; it might name work on historical texts concerned to critique current problems that originate in the past, such as climate change, imperialism, and economic inequality; it might name comparative work on abiding forms, like “the novel”; it might name experiments with articulating the resonance, relevance, and value of the past without recourse to instrumentality. What would be the strategies of reading and strategies of argument that these and other possible presentisms commend? What might presentism strategically accomplish for the humanities? What might it strategically accomplish for 19th century studies?

11-12:30 PLENARY ROUNDTABLE: Towards a Strategic Presentism: a V21 Collective Roundtable on the 21st-Century Urgencies of 19th-Century Study
Moderators: David Coombs, Clemson University
Danielle Coriale, University of South Carolina
Roundtable Participants:
Tanya Agathocleous, The Graduate Center, CUNY
S. Pearl Brilmyer, University of Oregon
Nathan K. Hensley, Georgetown University
Anna Kornbluh, University of Illinois at Chicago
Benjamin Morgan, The University of Chicago
Jesse Rosenthal, The Johns Hopkins University
Emily Steinlight, University of Pennsylvania

And check out the work of affiliates featured at these other sessions:

5C Above the Neck: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Senses
Moderator: Narin Hassan, Georgia Institute of Technology
“Natural Histories of the Face: Character and Caricature in Early-Victorian Word and Image.”
Rachel Teukolsky, Vanderbilt University
“Equal Natures: Phrenology, Feminism, and Victorian Culture.”
Shalyn Claggett, Mississippi State University
“The Impassive Novel: The Science and Aesthetics of ‘Brain-Building’ in Marius the Epicurean.”
Michael Tondre, Stony Brook University (SUNY)

7F Visions of Sand and Sea
Moderator: Melanie Conroy, University of Memphis
“A Matter of Representability: The Desert in French Orientalist Literature.”
Maria Beliaeva, New York University
“An Unnatural History: The Cryptozoology of J.W. Buell’s Sea and Land.”
Cheryl Price, University of North Alabama
“Hugo’s Guano: Sustainable Sewage in Les Misérables.”
Anne O’Neil-Henry, Georgetown University
“On Ships and Mates: Reading the Oceanic in Dombey and Son.”
Ryan Fong, Kalamazoo College

8B Eco-Histories
Moderator: Erika Behrisch Elce, Royal Military College of Canada
“Cursed Inheritance: Darwin’s Fertile Imagination.”
Devin Griffiths, University of Southern California
“Wallace Lines: Biogeography and Modernities in Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast in the Islands.”
Jen Hill, University of Nevada, Reno
“Late-Victorian Eco-(Dys)topias and the Problem of Sustainability.”
Deanna K. Kreisel, University of British Columbia
“English Cottage Gardens and the Predicaments of Modernity.”
Lynn Voskuil, University of Houston

8D Forms of Time: Presentism and Nineteenth-Century Literary Forms
Moderator: Megan Ward, Oregon State University 
“George Eliot’s Reading Lessons.”
David Coombs, Clemson University
“Forming Towards Form in the Victorian Novel.”
Anna Gibson, Duquesne University
“After Death: Christina Rossetti’s Timescales of Catastrophe.”
Nathan K. Hensley, Georgetown University

9D Speculative Fiction
Moderator: Nicole Lobdell, Georgia Institute of Technology
“Anachronism and Time Travel: Towards a Theory of Victorian Science Fiction.”
Sarah Alexander, University of Vermont
“Building a Bridge to Nowhere: Morris, Utopia, and the Problematics of Transition.”
Mark Allison, Ohio Wesleyan University.
“Hollow Earth Fiction in Late-Victorian Women’s Writing.”
Elizabeth Chang, University of Missouri

10C Unnatural Historicisms
Moderator: Ruth McAdams, University of Michigan
“A Medieval Matter: Living History through the Flesh in Victorian Fiction.”
Timothy Curran, University of South Florida
“‘Unnecessary’ Anachronisms: Realism’s Untimely Histories.”
Mary Mullen, Villanova University
“The Multiple Futures of the Past: Trollope, Turing, and the Historical Middle.”
Megan Ward, Oregon State University
“Out of the Pasts: Reading Sensation Fiction Through the Lens of Film Noir.”
Nora Gilbert, University of North

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