This two-day conference brings together young researchers to explore the 18th- and 19th-century city and its ideologies from a fully interdisciplinary perspective.
The conference will shed light on the city as a topography of struggle, a site of conflicting and interpenetrating layers, changing yet also persisting through time and space, and continually shaped by tensions between authority and resistance.
This conference is supported by the LARCA (Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones), the Ecole Doctorale 131 of Université Paris Di- derot and the monthly doctoral seminar ‘Victorian Persistence’ (Université Paris Diderot).
Persistent Spaces :
Politics, Aesthetics and Topography in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century City
A two-day pluridisciplinary postgraduate conference 12
th-13
thDecember 2013
Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7
Amphi Turing, Bâtiment Sophie Germain
THURSDAY, 12 DECEMBER
9.00
Registration, welcome, plenary address by Sara Thornton, Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Cultural Studies, Université Paris Diderot
9.30 - 10.30
Panel 1: Urbanism and urban planning
Chair: Allan Potofsky, Professor of Eighteenth-Century History, Université Paris Diderot Simona Gîrleanu (University of Marne-la-Vallée), ‘Capitals of the Enlightenment: London and
Paris Improved’
Yvonne Rickert (Philipps-University Marburg), ‘The Parisian “Place Louis XV”: The Effect of a Literary Clash on the Architectural Design’
10.30 - 11.00: Tea break 11.00 - 12.00
Panel 2: Urban Experiences of Poverty and Pauperism
Chair: Ariane Fennetaux, Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century Cultural Studies, Université Paris Diderot
Oliver Betts (University of York), ‘Disorderly Spaces – Homes in the Slums of London and Paris’
George Currie (Queen Mary University of London), ‘Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Carlyle and Urban Pauperism’
12.00 - 14.00: Lunch break 14.00 - 15.00
Panel 3: Instability of space, instability of self
Chair: Estelle Murail, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Cultural Studies, Université Paris-Diderot
Alexandra Logvinova (European Humanities University), ‘The Structure of Urban Daily Life in the 19th century as the Basis of Subject’s Anxiety’
Adrian Versteegh (New York University), ‘“Cycle in Epicycle, Orb in Orb”: Navigating the Thresholds, Passages and Nested Interiors of 19th-Century Urban Literature’
15.00 – 15.30: Tea break 15.30 – 17.00
Panel 4: Fragmented spaces and writing
Chair: Lynda Nead, Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London Alison Annunziata (University of Southern California), ‘Urban De-Enlightenment: A Russian’s
Dark Journey through Paris and London at the Start of the French Revolution’
Ushashi Dasgupta (St John’s College, University of Oxford), ‘“Is this an Hotel? Are There Thieves in the House?”: Dickens, Collins, and the Spatial Contexts of Crime’
Robert Yeates (University of Exeter), ‘The Destruction of the City in Early Science Fiction’
17.00 – 18.00 Keynote address:
Stéphane Van Damme, Professor of History of Science, European University Institute in Florence
‘Archaeology of Modernity: Making Metropolitan Past Tangible and Persistent: Paris, London, New York’
FRIDAY, 13 DECEMBER
9.30 - 10.30
Chair: Josephine McDonagh, Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature, King’s College, University of London
Ariane Fennetaux (University Paris Diderot), ‘Materializing History: Plebeian Women’s Pockets in 18th- and 19th-Century London’
10.30 - 11.00: Tea break 11.00 - 12.00
Panel 5: Disorientating the Orient
Chair: Colin Jones, Professor of Eighteenth-Century French History, Queen Mary College, London, Fellow of the British Academy
Michael Talbot (University of St Andrews), ‘Shifting Centres: the Political and Topographical Transformations of Ottoman Haifa, 1700-1900’
Natalia Starostina (Young Harris College), ‘Paris Oriental, Carnal Pleasures and the Spaces of Desires in Defining the Mental Topography of Paris from Montesquieu to Maupassant and to Paul Morand’
12.00 - 14.00: Lunch break 14.00 - 15.00 Panel 6: The city in science
Chair: Stéphane Van Damme, Professor of History of Science, European University Institute in Florence
Lavinia Maddaluno (University of Cambridge), ‘Spaces of Nature and Realms of Civilisation:
Pavia between Politics, Scientific Practices and Natural Order in the late 18th Century’
Mathieu Fernandez (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers), ‘Mapping the Third Dimension. Observing, Representing and Transforming Paris, 1750-1850’
15.00 - 15.30: Tea break 15.30 – 16.30 Keynote address:
Lynda Nead, Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London
‘The Tiger in the Smoke: The Fog of Modernity in Post-war London’
Contacts:
Clémence Folléa (clemence.follea@gmail.com) Clément Martin (clemm.martin@gmail.com)
