The 7th Biennial Symbiosis Conference
will be hosted at
Suffolk University, Boston

25–28 June, 2009

“Boston and the New Atlantic World”

Plenary speakers:

Richard E. Brantley (University of Florida)
Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia)
Mark Peterson (University of California, Berkeley)

In honor of Boston’s “New World” past and in recognition of its central role in what William Boelhower has termed the “new Atlantic studies matrix,” the 2009 Symbiosis conference committee is delighted to invite participation in a three-day conference, “Boston and the New Atlantic World.” Aiming to capitalize on the tremendous wealth of current scholarship on transatlantic subjects as well as to work on bridging the disciplinary gap between scholars of Atlantic literature and history, this conference will gather participants on the Suffolk University campus on Boston’s Beacon Hill, within striking distance of the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage Trail, the Museum of African American History, the Boston Athenaeum, and other sites of great Atlantic significance.

We invite proposals for panels and individual papers that engage a variety of transatlantic and/or transnational topics in the literatures and cultural histories of the Atlantic world. Papers that treat Boston as a site of Atlantic cultural exchange are especially welcome, although the conference is certainly not limited to local concerns. Submissions are encouraged from scholars of literary history from the early modern period to the present. Possible topics for panels and/or papers might include the following:

• European visions of the New World
• transcultural encounters around the Atlantic rim
• linguistic exchange and translation
• transatlantic religious experiments and institutions
• Atlantic revolutions (United States: 1776, France: 1789, Haiti: 1791, Europe: 1848)
• Atlantic utopianism (American colonies, Pantisocratic dreams, Fourierist communities, Liberian settlement)
• Atlantic genres (slave and captivity narratives, travel journals, ship’s logs, sermons, theatrical performances, epistolary novels, personal letters, newspaper dispatches)
• transatlantic publishing (literary reception and reputation, reviews and puffs, international editions and copyright disputes)
• transatlantic cultural celebrities
• transnational literary friendships, collaborations, and currents of influence
• artistic movements that crossed and recrossed the Atlantic (Romanticism, modernism)
• figures of the Black Atlantic (Wheatley, Equiano, Douglass, Brown, Delany, Jacobs, Wright, Baldwin, and others)
• transatlantic abolitionism (lecture tours, conventions, antislavery periodicals)
• competing nativist, nationalist, and cosmopolitan interests
• transamerican and hemispheric Atlantic studies: literary connections between the cultures of Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 1-page CV as Microsoft Word attachments to Professor Leslie Eckel by 10 January 10, 2009. Inquiries are welcome before then.

A conference website is under construction.

General Transatlantic papers from the 5th conference hosted by the School of English at the
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 30 June - 3 July 2005, appeared in Symbiosis Volume 10.
Papers focused on Anglo-American Hellenisms will appear in a collection of essays
edited by the Conference organizer Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou, School of English,
Department of American Literature and Culture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,
Thessaloniki 54 124, Greece

Email: trapatz@enl.auth.gr

Selected papers from the 4th Symbiosis Conference, held in Edinburgh in July 2003
in association with STAR (Scotland's Transatlantic Relations Project) were published in
Symbiosis 8.1 (April 2004), 8.2 (October), and 9.1 (April 2005)
and on the STAR website:

  http://www.star.ac.uk/Events/Conferences_events/Symbiosis/Symbiosis_conference.html