UK Hosts 19th Century Studies Scholars from Around the World

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 15, 2012) ― The University of Kentucky will host a group of distinguished scholars from across the world on March 22-25. The Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Conference, an annual meeting of scholars dedicated to interdisciplinary discussion and research, will take place in Lexington at the Downtown Hilton hotel.

The organization exists to support scholarly work that transcends disciplinary boundaries in cultural studies. The members meet annually in various locations, both nationally and internationally, and maintain a collaborative relationship with an interdisciplinary journal -- Nineteenth Century Contexts.

The conference, titled, "Picturing the Nineteenth Century" will center upon art and visual culture, as well as "picturing" the 19th century through different senses: mapping, framing, imagining and representing.

The conference will also feature panels and papers that focus on how the 19th century represented itself to itself, through depictions of history, culture and subjectivity; emerging technologies; and self-conscious "meta" attempts to understand methods of representation.

Several distinguished experts will speak:

Shawn Michelle Smith is an associate professor of visual and critical studies, in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of "Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture" (Duke University Press, 2005) and "American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture" (Princeton University Press, 1999). She has served on the editorial boards of American Literature and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She is also on the board of Photography and Culture. As a practicing artist and scholar, Smith is currently completing a book of the ways photography transformed perception in the 19th century.

Nancy Armstrong is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of "How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism 1719-1900" (Columbia University Press, 2005), "Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism" (Harvard University Press, 1999), and "Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel" (Oxford University Press, 1987). As editor of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction, which she has held since 1996, Armstrong has devoted her career to explaining how novels depict a world that can be inhabited (or not) in specific ways by historically and culturally variable relationships.

Julie Codell is a professor of art history at the School of Art at Arizona State University. She is the author of "The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870-1910" (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and the editor of "Transculturation in British Art, 1780-1930" (Ashgate, 2012) and "Power and Resistance: Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars" (Mapin, 2011), among other volumes. She has published in journals in literature, art history, film and Asian studies, and has edited special issues of Victorian Periodicals Review. She was also the interim director of Film and Media Studies at ASU from 2010-2011.

This conference is sponsored by the UK Office of the Vice President for Research; the UK College of Arts and Sciences and its departments of English, History, and Art History; The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky; the Miami University of Ohio English Department; the University of Louisville English Department; the Vanderbilt University English Department; and Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies.

For more information about the conference, visit http://incs.as.uky.edu/.