“BORDERS”
May 19-21, 2022
Baylor University | Waco, Texas
Keynote Speakers
Betty Joseph (Rice University) and Carolyn Day (Furman University)
Roundtable Plenary
“Widening the Borders of British Studies”
The organizers of the 2022 BWWC invite papers and panel proposals interpreting the theme of “Borders” in global British women’s writing across the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This year’s BWWC calls for papers that contextualize that history bearing in mind changes in the field itself, as it turns towards the global and the transatlantic. “Borders” may be broadly interpreted to include scholarship concerning borders within and among scholarly disciplines, borders within form and genre, political and geographical borders, socio-economic boundaries and borders, and borders among individuals or identities, especially between and within historically marginalized racial and ethnic communities.
The long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were disorienting periods in British history as the borders of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, geography, economics, and aesthetics were drawn and redrawn. This flux manifested itself in physical and ideological “border crossings” between the rural and the urban, the religious and the secular, the domestic and the professional, the private and the public, the metropole and the periphery, and so on. When, where, and how are these borders crossed and merged to create new categories and new tensions, redrawing and shifting traditional binary oppositions? How might contemporary scholars disrupt historical boundaries between literatures, people, cultures, and disciplines to uncover and make evident intersectionality? Which women writers have been included and excluded from the canon and how might the borders of this canon be widened? The 2022 BWWC invites contributors to articulate and speculate on crossing, transgressing, retreating from, and reinforcing such dividing lines.
In response to the 2021 BWWC “Reorientations,” panels and papers that address race, ethnicity, racism, and/or white privilege across the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are especially welcome. For example, interrogations of individual or group identities might examine the borders between white supremacists and BIPOC as well as the borders that exist within and amongst BIPOC communities. Or perhaps, speaking to the conference’s location in Texas, papers might consider how borders (literal and metaphorical) are constructed. How might conversations about borders in the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries influence the ways scholars think about borders in the world today? Who constructs these borders? How (and by whom) are these borders maintained?
Abstracts are due January 14, 2022, and may be submitted through the online form.
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 |
Land Borders Enclosure/Demarcation/Preservation Coastal Boundaries/Ocean/Seaside City/Suburb/Estate/Country Landscaping and Gardening Practices The Metropole and the Periphery (Formal and Informal) |
| Identity: Race, Ethnicity, Religion Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Diasporas White Erasure/Construction of BIPOC Identities BIPOC Voices and Self-Representations Britishness, the Performance of Whiteness Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Abolition Oriental Tales and Orientalism Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Identities |
Disciplinary Borders Form/Forms (Poetic, Generic, Ritual, Material) National vs. Transnational Literatures Expanding/Erasing the Borders of the Field Borders Created by the Canon Problems of Periodization Undisciplining the Academy |
| Global Migrations: Elective and Forced The Unbordered Frontiers, Exploration v. Colonization Travel Writing Oceanic Writing Transatlantic Crossings Slave Narratives |
Social Borders Bodies: Marked, Viewed, Contained, Controlled, and Liberated Sensorium Borders Collective Bodies and the Census Medical Access, Physical/Mental Wellbeing Human/Nonhuman/More than Human Self/Other Spheres of Power/Influence (Domestic, Industrial, etc.) Socio-economic Divisions Religious Influence and Engagement |
| Border Transgressions Limits and Limitations Trespassing Restraints/Constraints Apparitions and Spiritualism Borderline Behavior |
Aesthetic Borders Art/Science Architecture, Follies, and Artificial Ruins Verbal/Visual/Audio Media Historical and/or Temporal Collapse Genre Transgressions Fictional Borders |