Program

CONFERENCE PROGRAM
(updated 6/8/09)

The 7th Biennial Symbiosis Conference:
“Boston and the New Atlantic World”

Suffolk University, Boston
June 25-27, 2009

THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2009

11:00-4:00

Conference Registration
Sargent Hall, 1st Floor Lobby

11:30-1:30

Lunch
Sargent Hall Cafeteria, 4th Floor

12:00-1:30

Walking Tour of the Black Heritage Trail
Led by the National Park Service
Meet at Shaw Memorial, corner of Beacon and Park Streets, across from State House

2:00-3:30

Walking Tour of Boston’s Revolutionary Sites
Led by Professor Robert Allison, Chair of the History Department, Suffolk University
Meet in Sargent Hall, 1st Floor Lobby

4:00-4:10

Conference Welcome
Sargent Hall, Room 295

Leslie Eckel, Suffolk University
Joel Pace, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire

4:10-5:30

Plenary Session 1
Sargent Hall, Room 295

“Boston, the Problem of Slavery, and the Nature of the Atlantic World”
Mark Peterson, University of California, Berkeley

5:30-6:30

Opening Reception
Sargent Hall, 4th Floor Atrium

FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2009

8:30-1:00

Conference Registration
Sargent Hall, 1st Floor Lobby

9:00-10:20

Panel 1(a)
Sargent Hall, Room 315

Travel Writing: Transatlantic Arts and Affections
Chair: Jonathan Mulrooney, College of the Holy Cross
1. “Ruskin’s Aesthetics and Sophia Hawthorne’s Cathedral Letters,” Julie Hall, Sam Houston State University
2. “An Atlantic Cable of Affection: John B. Gough’s Civil War-era Lectures on Great Britain,” Tom Wright, University of Cambridge
3. “Art and its Affects: Harriet Beecher Stowe in Europe, 1852-1859,” Elif Armbruster, Suffolk University

Panel 1(b)
Sargent Hall, Room 385

Transatlanticism and the 20th Century
Chair: Quentin Miller, Suffolk University
1. “Encouraging America: Louis MacNeice and BBC Propaganda in 1941,” Peter Golphin, Open University
2. “‘Spanish is a language tú’: The Intersecting Nationalities of Hemingway and Santayana,” Jeffrey Herlihy, University of Puerto Rico

10:40-12:00

Panel 2(a)
Sargent Hall, Room 315

Transatlantic Print Culture
Chair: Elif Armbruster, Suffolk University
1. “John Bradford, Kentucky Jacobin,” Matthew David Smith, Miami University of Ohio
2. “The Transcendentalist Imperative: The Westminster Review and America, 1830-1860,” Robert Scholnick, College of William and Mary
3. “Edward Dowden: Shelley’s Scapegoat (As Sacrificed by Matthew Arnold and Mark Twain),” Alex Effgen, Boston University

Panel 2(b)
Sargent Hall, Room 385

The Travel Narratives of Charles Dickens
Chair: Christopher Gair, University of Glasgow
1. “‘Thou Western Athens!’: Dickens and Trollope in Boston,” Christopher Coffman, Boston University
2. “Transatlantic Pastoral in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit,” Sarah Wagner-McCoy, Harvard University
3. “Transatlantic Dickens; or Travels through 19th Century Book History in America,” David Bordelon, Ocean County College

12:00-1:00

Lunch
Sargent Hall Cafeteria, 4th Floor

1:00-2:20

Panel 3(a)
Sargent Hall, Room 315

Identity Formations in the Early Black Atlantic
Chair: Robert Allison, Suffolk University
1. “Olaudah Equiano’s Iconographical and Verbal Self-Representations,” Teresa Gibert, UNED, Madrid
2. “Written—and Freed—By Herself: Phillis Wheatley as Lay Lawyer,” Alice Kracke, University of South Alabama
3. “A romance that failed?: Reading Henry Francis Downing’s The American Cavalryman,” Parween Ebrahim, Princeton University

Panel 3(b)
Sargent Hall, Room 385

Transatlantic Sympathy
Chair: Rich Miller, Suffolk University
1. “‘Playing at Puchpin’: Sympathy as a Rhetorical Structure in Livingston v. Jefferson, Case of the New Orleans Batture,” Kristin Cook, University of Edinburgh
2. “From Fellow-Feeling to Narcissistic Sympathy: Projections of the White Self in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Reconstructed America,” Lise Sorensen, University of Edinburgh
3. “Transatlantic Romanticism and the End of Enlightenment,” Matthew Scott, University of Reading

2:30-3:50

Panel 4(a)
Sargent Hall, Room 315

Cultural Conflict in Early America
Chair: Jeremy Solomons, Suffolk University
1. “Identity Creation in Response to Trauma: Benjamin Church’s Colonial American War Narrative,” Kimberly Dougherty, University of New Hampshire
2. “‘Like a Company of Sheep’: Transatlantic Influences on the Development of the Indian Captivity Narrative,” Bill Stratton, Bowling Green State University
3. “Entangled Atlantic Identities: Loyalism, Patriotism, and Personal Heritage in Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln,” James Weldon Long, Louisiana State University

Panel 4(b)
Sargent Hall, Room 385

Reframing the Black Atlantic
Chair: Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
1. “Losing It All in the Atlantic: Toward a Theory of Oceanic Emptiness,” Leslie Eckel, Suffolk University
2. “Melancholic Journeys of Discovery: Theorizing the Contemporary Black Atlantic Travel Narrative,” Kajsa Henry, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
3. “Hints of William Blake in On Beauty (2005): or, Zadie Smith’s Transatlantic Homage to Boston,” R. Victoria Arana, Howard University

3:50-4:20

Tea/Coffee Break
Sargent Hall, 2nd Floor Atrium

4:20-5:40

Plenary Session 2
Sargent Hall, Room 295

“Dickinson’s Empirical Voice: ‘… almost as omniscient as God’”
Richard Brantley, University of Florida

6:30 for 7:00

Conference Banquet
Union Club
8 Park Street

SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 2009

9:00-10:20

Panel 5(a)
Sargent Hall, Room 315

Eastward Glances: New Worlds and Old Homes
Chair: Betsy Klimasmith, University of Massachusetts, Boston
1. “Between a Lover and a Brother: Susanna Rowson and Transatlantic Identity Politics,” Betsy Klimasmith, University of Massachusetts, Boston
2. “Scotland in the Nineteenth-Century American Literary Imaginary,” Whitney Womack Smith, Miami University of Ohio
3. “Walt Whitman, his Anglocentric Coordinates, and the Crystal Palace Exhibition,” Philip Tew, Brunel University

Panel 5(b)
Sargent Hall, Room 385

Transatlantic Narratives
Chair: Pamela Buck, Suffolk University
1. “Large Letters and Broad Margins: Counterfeit Narratives in the Transatlantic Print Public Sphere,” Danielle Skeehan, Northeastern University
2. “Men of Action: The British Adventure Genre and African American Fiction,” Sarah Ficke, University of North Carolina
3. “The Aesthetics of Risk in Daniel Deronda and The House of Mirth,” Victoria Shinbrot, California State University, Sacramento

10:40-12:00

Panel 6(a)
Sargent Hall, Room 315

Transatlantic Scotland and Ireland
Chair: Leonard von Morzé, University of Massachusetts, Boston
1. “The Irish National Tale in America: Transatlantic Conceptions of Race and National Identity,” Ashley Alford, University of Washington
2. “Douglass in Ireland, Historical Duty and Donal O’Kelly’s The Cambria,” Sinéad Moynihan, University of Nottingham
3. “‘Art Transforms the Savage Face of Things’: Scottish Identity & the ’45 Jacobite Rebellion in James Grainger’s West Indian Georgic, The Sugar-Cane,” Louis Kirk McAuley, Washington State University

Panel 6(b)
Sargent Hall, Room 385

Race and Slavery in the Atlantic World
Chair: Richard Brantley, University of Florida
1. “Medical Visions of Containment: Gothic Horror, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Kelly Bezio, University of North Carolina
2. “The Omission of ‘a Great Many Things’: Maritime Erasures and Transatlantic Empire-Building in a Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man,” Jeffrey Gagnon, University of California, San Diego
3. “Transatlantic Abolitionism: The National Anti-slavery Bazaar at Boston,” Jewon Woo, University of Minnesota

12:00-1:00

Lunch
Cafeteria closed: bring your own
Sargent Hall, 1st Floor Function Room

1:00-2:20

Panel 7(a)
Sargent Hall, Room 315

The Transatlantic Sciences
Chair: Matthew Scott, University of Reading
1. “The Travels of an Idea: The 4th Dimension in America,” Elizabeth Throesch, York St. John University
2. “Interpreting Flora’s Interpreter: Plants, Texts, Nations, and Sarah Josepha Buell Hale,” Kelli Towers, University of Colorado, Boulder
3. “‘Conjecturing a Climate’: The Discovery of Transatlantic Weather,” Marilyn Gaull, The Editorial Institute at Boston University

Panel 7(b)
Sargent Hall, Room 385

Early Atlantic Genres
Chair: Bruce Graver, Providence College
1. “The Impact of the Dissolution of the Virginia Company on George Herbert and the Ferrars of Little Gidding,” Regina Walton, Boston University
2. “London, Boston, and Bermuda: Networks of (Un)Godly in the Revolutionary English Atlantic,” Rachel Schnepper, Rutgers University
3. “Between Continents: Negotiating Genre in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave,” Johanna Pittman, University of New Hampshire

2:30-3:50

Panel 8(a)
Sargent Hall, Room 315

Transatlantic Philanthropy: Poverty, Charity, and Education
Chair: Whitney Womack Smith, Miami University of Ohio
1. “Coleridge and Vermont Transcendentalism,” Samantha Harvey, Auburn University Montgomery
2. “Children in the Temple Garden: Reading Alcott’s Architecture and Froebel’s Gifts,” Jessica Collier, University of California, Irvine
3. “From Warnings-Out to Workhouses: Count Rumford and the Making of a Transatlantic Literature of Poor Relief,” Leonard von Morzé, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Panel 8(b)
Sargent Hall, Room 385

Boston in Translation: Spanish and French Influences
Chair: Joel Pace, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
1. “Boston criollo: Francisco de Miranda’s Diario de viaje a Estados Unidos [Diary of a Tour of the United States] (1783-1784) and Latin American Independence,” Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2. “Madame de Staël Comes to Boston,” Bruce Graver, Providence College

3:50-4:20

Tea/Coffee Break
Sargent Hall, 2nd Floor Atrium

A Look Ahead to Symbiosis 2011 in Glasgow
Christopher Gair, University of Glasgow
Sargent Hall, Room 295

4:20-5:40

Panel 9(a)
Sargent Hall, Room 315

American Fiction in a Transatlantic Context
Chair: Philip Tew, Brunel University
1. “Shipwreck of State: Indian Ghosts, Barbary Captivity, and Racial Paranoia in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Patrick Gleason, University of California, San Diego
2. “The Child of Nature: Master Betty’s Performance in Herman Melville’s The Fiddler,” Michael Collins, University of Nottingham
3. “Melville and Transnationalism; Misreading ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ as Nationalistic Manifesto,” Ida Rothschild, Boston University

Panel 9(b)
Sargent Hall, Room 385

The Haitian Revolution and the French Atlantic Triangle
Chair: Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1. “Changing the Tune of Freedom and Fraternity: French Revolutionary Songs Celebrating the 1794 Abolition of Slavery,” Michelle Cheyne, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
2. “Trouillot and Romantic Literary Critics: the Haitian Revolution and After,” Christine Gallant, Georgia State University
3. “Atlantic Anxieties: Prince Saunders and the Uneasy Career of Haitian Independence,” Barbara Lewis, University of Massachusetts, Boston

5:45-7:00

Plenary Session 3
Sargent Hall, Room 295

“Transatlantic vs. Hemispheric: A Mercy and the Methods of American Studies”
Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia

One thought on “Program

  1. R. Victoria Arana

    Is it really too late to register for this conference? And is it really to late to make arrangements for accommodation? I only just learned about this conference about two weeks ago. I posted a query at that time, but have received no reply from you. I would like to attend the conference in any case–if it were possible. But I do need to make travel arrangements from Maryland to Massachusetts and would like to make these in full knowledge of the facts.

    Please respond?

    R. Victoria Arana
    FRSA, Prof. of English and Comparative Literature
    Howard University
    Washington, DC

    Reply

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