dolfo Ibáñez University and the consortium of institutions sponsoring this event are delighted to invite you to the 2027 World Congress of the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, centered on the theme “Global Imaginaries, Maritime Power, and Intercontinental Circulations: the Ambivalent Legacies of the Long Nineteenth Century.” The congress will be held in Viña del Mar, overlooking the port city of Valparaíso.
The city of Valparaíso—overlooking which this event will take place—presents itself as a site of memory that evokes the ambivalent legacies of the nineteenth century. Its distinctive urban geography recalls a time of prosperity and grandeur, simultaneously linked to the rise of transpacific trade following the Hispanic American independences, to the construction of the Chilean nation-state, and to the emergence of a cosmopolitan and free-trade ideology that facilitated massive immigration and the flourishing of capitalism. Intellectuals, travelers, sailors, diplomats, and merchants who passed through its docks and streets envisioned this southern emporium in diverse ways: as a land of opportunity for private enterprise, as a node of commercial civilization and American republican modernity, as the radiating hub of Chile’s maritime expansion, and as a site of projection for imperial powers contending for regional hegemony.
A walk through the city situates us before this complex past and invites reflection on its inheritances. Valparaíso’s enigmatic ecosystem of ruined palaces, abandoned mansions, and shuttered companies compels us to experience decline firsthand. We become aware of the volatile, fleeting, and unstable character of the historical dynamics that once brought the port its golden age. Its urban landscapes, as beautiful as they are dilapidated, operate as a suggestive metonymy, urging us to pose historical questions about how variations in international order, maritime power, and global circuits of exchange shaped the rise and fall of contemporary societies since the long nineteenth century.
This Congress invites participants to engage with the unresolved legacies of the long nineteenth century, organizing their contributions around the following themes while selecting their own spatial and temporal frameworks of analysis:
- I. Maritime Power and Global Geopolitics: Development of naval empires, maritime infrastructures, and oceanic territorialities; shifting visions of international order and regional hegemony.
- II. Circulations Across Continents and Oceans: Flows of people, goods, knowledge, and species; diasporas, trade routes, missions, and transnational entanglements.
- III. Port Cities and Urban Imaginaries: Port cities as cosmopolitan laboratories; their architecture, social fabric, memoryscapes, and connections to global capitalism.
- IV. Aesthetic Forms and Representations of the Global: Literary, visual, and performative representations of mobility, empire, modernity, and decline across the arts and media.
- V. Ambivalent Legacies of Liberalism and Capitalism: Tensions between progress and exclusion, free trade and dispossession, cosmopolitanism and empire, as articulated in politics, economy, and culture.
- VI. Afterlives of the Long Nineteenth Century: Memory, heritage, and the persistence of nineteenth-century structures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century imaginaries, institutions, and aesthetics.
Building upon the Congress theme, “Global Imaginaries, Maritime Power, and Intercontinental Circulations: the Ambivalent Legacies of the Long Nineteenth Century,” we invite paper and panel proposals that explore unresolved legacies of the nineteenth century from a wide range of disciplinary and comparative perspectives.
Proposals may engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- Visions of international order and global geopolitics in nineteenth-century thought.
- Imaginations of post-imperial possibilities for the organization of power and society.
- The development of maritime power in its military, institutional, technological, and commercial dimensions.
- The creation of intercontinental and transnational networks of circulation of knowledge, ideas, goods, and practices, and their impact on power structures.
- The legacies of the nineteenth century in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: memory, structural connections, and comparative perspectives.
Please submit proposals through the online form.
For Individual papers, please include an abstract of 200-250 words and a short bio of 100-150 words.
For panels (3-4 participants), please include a panel rationale of 200-250 words, abstracts of each paper (200-250 words each), and short bios for all participants (100-150 words each)
While the working language of the congress is English, we welcome paper and panel proposals in Spanish. An ad hoc committee is currently exploring ways to incorporate additional languages into our future events, although the Council has warmly welcome, and a Spanish version of the Call for Papers will also be made available.
Deadline for submissions: May 30, 2026
Created 24 March 2026 Last modified 25 March 2026