Circulation

For the inaugural meeting of an annual workshop devoted to the discussion of new, interdisciplinary work in Nineteenth-Century Studies, we will discuss papers that explore the importance of circulation—of goods, print, persons, money, and ideas—to nineteenth-century culture and society. 

The nineteenth century was an age of mass circulation of newspapers and magazines; of forced migration and exodus; of developing expertise in networks of trade and colonial exploitation; of the emergence of standardized time for travel by steamship and by rail; of the transnational circulation of theatrical performances, medicine shows, and fraudulent currency; and of new understandings of the movement of languages, species, and cultures. The end of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery in many empires and nations, new forms of colonialism (of both the extractive and settler varieties) as well as massive labor migrations, all radically altered individuals’ sense of place and belonging, and what constituted the local and the global.

How was the movement of commodities, capital, and human bodies governed, promoted, and understood by different groups and organizations?  How did nineteenth-century cultural works orient themselves to new conditions of circulation?  In an age of increasingly coordinated circulation, where were the blockages? What stayed still? 

Thursday, October 2

3:00 p.m. Welcome - Registration Required - Murray Hall 302 

3:15-4:45 

María Alejandra Aguilar Dornelles, Romance Languages and Literatures, State University of New York, Oswego
“My Beloved Commodity: Portrayals of Women Intellectuals and Artists in the Caribbean Cultural Market, 1868–1912”

Ke Ren, History, Indiana University, South Bend
“The Abandoned Courtesan, the Redeemed Duchess and the Heroic Maiden: Rewritings of Chinese Romantic Tales in Fin-de-Siècle Paris”

Moderated by Chris Iannini, English, Rutgers

5:00 pm Zimmerli Museum - Keynote - Open to the University Community

Introduced by Meredith McGill, English, Rutgers

6:30 Reception at the Zimmerli

(please note that visitors to the Keynote Lecture and Reception may park in Lots 11, 16, 26, 30 and the College Avenue Parking Deck without permits on October 2 only)

Friday, October 3

9:00-10:30 - Registration Required - Murray Hall 302 

Patrick Chappell, English, Rutgers University
“Diamond Circulation, the Sensation Novel, and Neoformalist Thing Theory”

Moderated by Emma Lieber, German, Russian, and Eastern European Languages and Literatures, Rutgers

10:45-12:15 - Registration Required

Debjani Bhattacharyya, History, Drexel University
“Marsh as Political Modernity: Charting the New Regimes of Value in Colonial South Asia”

Wen-Shing Chou, Art History, Hunter College
“A Panorama of Visions: Religion and Empiricism in 19th-Century Pilgrimage Maps of Mt. Wutai”

Moderated by Seth Koven, History, Rutgers

12:15-1:15 Lunch (box lunches provided) - Registration Required

1:15-2:00 - Registration Required

Interview with Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Yale University

Carolyn Williams, English, Rutgers

2:00-3:30 - Registration Required

Edyta Bojanowska, German, Russian, and Eastern European Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, Rutgers
“Pineapples in Petersburg, Cabbage Soup on the Equator: Circuits of Global Trade in a Mid-Nineteenth Century Russian Travelogue”

Christina Spiker, Visual Studies, UC Irvine
“Constructing the Indigenous: Nineteenth-Century Circulation and Transformation of the Ainu Image in British and American Print Culture”

Moderated by Carla Yanni, Art History, Rutgers

Registration is closed, as the workshops are full.  Please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to be placed on our waiting list.