he organizers of the 2022 British Women Writers Conference, held this year at Baylor University invite papers and panel proposals interpreting the theme of “Borders” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women’s writing. In response to the 2021 BWWC “Reorientations,” panels and papers on topics related to race and ethnicity are especially welcome.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were exciting and disorienting periods in British history as the borders of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, geography, economics, and aesthetics were drawn and redrawn on the cultural map. This flux manifested itself in physical and ideological “border crossings” between the rural and urban, the religious and the secular, the domestic and the professional, the private and the public, the metropole and the periphery, and so on. The theme of “Borders” invites contributors to articulate and speculate on crossing, redrawing, transgressing, retreating from, and reinforcing such dividing lines.
Borders may be broadly interpreted to include scholarship concerning borders within and between scholarly disciplines, borders within form and genre, political and geographical borders, socio-economic boundaries and borders, and borders between individuals or identities, particularly those of diverse racial or ethnic identities. Papers and panels may interpret various topics, including:
Political Demarcations
- Refugees
- Parliamentary Debates
- National Borders
- Acts of “Union”
- Ports of Entry and Treaty Ports
- Borders as Boundaries
Identity: Race, Ethnicity, Religion
- Slavery and Abolition
- Oriental Tales and Orientalism
- Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Identities
Global Migrations: Elective and Forced
- The Unbordered
- Frontiers; Exploration v. Colonization
- Travel Writing
- Oceanic Writing
- Transatlantic Crossings
- Slave Narratives
Border Transgressions
- Limits and Limitations
- Trespassing
- Restraints/Constraints
- Apparitions and Spiritualism
- Borderline Behavior
Land Borders
- Enclosure/Demarcation/Preservation
- Coastal Boundaries/Ocean/Seaside
- City/Suburb/Estate/Country
- Gardens and Gardening Practices
Disciplinary Borders
- orm/Forms (Poetic, Generic, Ritual, Material)
- Expanding/Erasing the Borders of the Field
- Borders Created by the Canon
- Undisciplining the Academy
Social Borders
- Bodies: Marked, Viewed, Contained, Controlled, Liberated
- Collective Bodies and the Census
- Medical Access, Physical/Mental Wellbeing
- Human/Nonhuman
- Self/Other
- Spheres of Power/Influence (domestic, industrial, etc.)
- Socio-economic Divisions
- Religious Influence and Engagement
Aesthetic Borders
- Art/science
- Architecture, Follies and Artificial Ruins
- Verbal/Visual/Audio media
- Historical and/or Temporal Collapse
- Genre transgressions
- Fictional Borders
Abstracts are due January 14, 2022, and may be submitted through the website.
Last modified 7 October 2021