Moving Forwards, Looking Back: Thinking about progress 1800-1850

Friday 4 -- Saturday 5 April 2003,   PLEASE NOTE NEW DATES
Senate House, University of London, UK

Keynote speakers:
Professor Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Professor Peter Bowler (Queens University, Belfast)
Professor James Chandler (University of Chicago)
Professor Annie Janowitz (QMW, University of London)

Second Call for Papers

What did people think about progress in the years 1800-1850? Did they 
conceive of the changes happening in their world as improvement or 
decline; did they see themselves as moving forward, or were they 
looking back? Did they see themselves at the start of a new age of 
technological improvement and social reform, or did they view the huge 
changes taking place around them as a threat to tradition?

The great age of progress is often regarded as the period after the 
Great Exhibition, but the decades before this saw a ferment of 
innovative developments in fields ranging from industry to music. We 
invite papers from across disciplines on aspects of early nineteenth-
century progressivism, representations of progress and reactions to 
progress.

We are particularly interested in submission on the following themes:

Progress in the visual arts
Nostalgia
Millenarianism
The progress of the sciences 
Progress and religion
Abolitionism, emancipation and enfranchisement
Anti-progressivists
New movements in criticism 
Technological advances

Abstracts on earlier themes are also welcome:

European thinking on progress and its influence in Britain 
Fictions of progress 
The improvement of Man 
Conservation 
The forward march of history 
Revolutions 
Proponents of the new 
Popular protests against progress 
The Poor Law 
The progress of Empire 
Female progressives 
Metaphors of progress 
Pessimism 

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by 8 November 2002 
to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]

Organizers:

Nicola Bown, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, Malet
Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK. 
David Clifford, Homerton College, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 2PH UK.

E-mail submission is preferred, but no attachments please.