Dear Members of the Romantic Illustration Network (RIN):

Greetings! You are invited to submit a paper proposal for the 28th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). The NASSR conference, which will take place at the University of Toronto, Ontario on August 6-9, 2020, will bring together 300-400 scholars to discuss literature, philosophy, politics, art, and culture c. 1770-1840.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://sites.utoronto.ca/wincs/nassr2020

Keynote Speakers:
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University)
Martin Myrone (Tate Britain)

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Re-envisioning Romanticism: looking back and looking forward 
• Visions and the visionary: perception, prognostication, projection, speculation, the speculative
• Ways of looking: reading, conceptualizing, observing, peeping, gazing, categorizing, examining, recognizing and misrecognizing
• Visual culture, philosophy, and aesthetics: objects of sight, spectacle, the spectacular, the sublime and the beautiful
• Reading methods and histories: careful, close, distant, surface; plagiarism, copyright law
• Print culture in its social, theoretical, and physical aspects (e.g. text, design, structure, layout); manuscripts, letters, journals, scrapbooks, books, journals, newspapers
• The seen and the unseen: noumena, phenomena, the spirit world, apparitions and appearances
• Romantic iconoclasm and anti-representationalism; ocularcentrism and “the tyranny of the eye”
• Visual communication: text, numbers, notation (e.g. musical), images, sign language, placards, banners, flags, gestures, hieroglyphs, emblems, insignia
• Questions of form and representation 
• Fashionable looking: costume, hair, makeup, manner, style, taste, places to see and be seen
• Visualizing gender and sexuality: identity, performance, politics 
• Visual and scenic arts: sculpture, painting, illustration, graphic satire, print shops, pornography, broadsheets, dioramas, panoramas, architectural and landscape design
• Theatre and performing arts: set design, lighting, visual effects, costume, body movement, dance, pantomime, attitudes, tableaux vivants
• Art collection and assessment: museums and curation, connoisseurship, formal and evaluative concerns (e.g. light, color, pattern, shape, scale, proportion)
• Visualizing class: social hierarchies and signifiers (e.g. clothing, heraldry, pageantry), occupational and economic segregation
• Instruments of looking: lenses, spectacles, quizzing glasses, spy glasses, Claude glasses, prisms, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, orreries, windows
• Forms of illumination and darkness: lightning, electricity, candlelight, lamps, gas light, spotlights, limelight, torches, fireworks; shade, shadow, twilight, gloom, obscurity
• Religious vision(s): prophecy, revelation, enthusiasm, sermons and hymns, public and private devotion, natural and revealed religion
• The science of the eye: vision, optics, visual anatomy, medicine, pathology, disability, blindness
• Data visualization (e.g. land, economy, population studies): mapping, cartography, geography, geolocation, charts, diagrams, categorization, numerical and pictorial statistics
• Visualizing race: slavery, racism, racialization, minoritization 
• Vision and ecopoetics: seeing nature (vistas, prospects, the picturesque); noticing and reading features of land, water, and sky; watching weather and recognizing climate; the animal gaze
• Envisioning space and place: the local and the global, home and abroad, the peripheral and transperipheral
• Envisioning (the ends of) empire: imperialism, colonialism, sites and sights of war; decolonization, indigenization
• Political and military forecasting, strategy, optics, campaigns, battlegrounds, political theatre
• Imagining the future of Romanticism; strategizing its work in the humanities, in the university, and in society

EMAIL CONTACT: nassr2020vision@gmail.com

POSTER: Please see attached and share widely.

**The deadline for general submissions is 24 January 2020.**

We look forward to receiving your proposals!

Sincerely Yours,
Terry F. Robinson (and on behalf of John Savarese and the NASSR 2020 conference committee)