[AMS-announce] CFP: "The Pursuit of Happiness, " INCS Conference, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, Apr 2009

[Announcements for the AMS]

CALL FOR PAPERS:   INTERDISCIPLINARY NINETEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES (INCS) CONFERENCE

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Sponsored by Bard College and Skidmore College
at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
April 24-26, 2009

Following on the 2008 INCS theme, The Emergence of Human Rights, this conference will
focus on the pursuit of happiness, that elusive corollary to life and liberty. What
form did happiness and the comprehension of happiness take in the nineteenth century?
How, for example, did the legacy of the American and French Revolutions shape
nineteenth-century understandings of happiness? What were the effects of burgeoning
industrialism? In keeping with the recent turn to studies of emotion, feeling, and affect
within literary studies as well as psychology, economics, history, and philosophy, we
invite papers on the nineteenth-century contexts and genealogies for such work.  And, in
acknowledgment of our 2009 conference location. Saratoga Springs, NY, we particularly
encourage papers exploring Victorian pleasure-seeking as having provided popular, if
contested, routes to happiness.

Topics may include:

Joy
Luxury and pleasure in a democratic republic
Wealth
Leisure
Beauty, art
Speculation (gambling, chance)
Family, friendship, love
Recreation
Rights, liberties
Race, class, gender and ethnic perspectives on happiness
Leisure
Virtue, working for the good of others
Health, spas, hygiene
The cultivation of emotions
Shopping / consumer desire
Vacations / travel
Misery, the absence of happiness;
   and pain, the opposite of pleasure
Architecture of happiness

INCS encourages interdisciplinary perspectives integrating:  Literature, Law, Political
Science, Philosophy, Theology, History, Music and Art History, History of Science, Sociology,
Anthropology, Psychology, Economics, Health Sciences.

200 word abstracts by October 15, 2008 to Deirdre d'Albertis, Bard College via e-mail at:
dalberti at bard.edu

For more information on INCS see:  www.nd.edu/~incshp/
Selected conference papers published in *Nineteenth-Century Contexts*