Gathering outside the UK for the first time since its founding, the Bristish Association of 19th-Century Americanists invites us to ponder collectively what it means to be a 19th-century Americanist today, in a world of resurgent borders and identities; a world where what we may have too hastily taken for granted—fluid ontologies, veer ecologies, democratic futurities, queer unmoorings—suddenly seem obsolete or utopic anew.

In the past 20 years, the development of transnational, transatlantic, hemispheric, diasporic, planetary, frameworks have questioned national-analytic categories and the old (?) paradigm of American exceptionalism, and showed that US literary culture was imbricated in a cultural and economic world system. In addition, the ongoing environmental crisis and the persistent fear of new pandemics have made repeatedly clear the limitations of national borders and the inadequacy of national solutions to global and planetary challenges. At the same time, as Ralph Bauer has argued in regard to early American literature, “one of the ironies of this declaration of independence from the proto-nationalist ‘origins’ model … has been that early American literature has once again become British” and more broadly anglo-centric. It may be time to “unseat the fiction of American literature’s monolingual and Anglocentric root” (Gruesz) and unsettle the borders of “American” literature anew. From the “founding” era to the Progressive Age and beyond, from the drafting of the American constitution to the Anti-Immigration laws of the late 19th century and beyond, this symposium will reexamine the state of/in Americanist studies, and “the making of Americans” and of “American” literature and literary culture with, across, and beyond borders.

Michael Boyden (U of Fribourg) will give a keynote.

You will find the full CFP here.

Individual paper or group proposals are welcome. Please submit abstracts of 200 words for 15 to 20 min-papers and 100-word bios to BrANCAinPARIS@gmail.com by September 15, 2025.