CFP: ESSE 2024 Lausanne, August 2024 – Workshop n°54: Waters and Environmental Crisis in the nineteenth century

The text of the call is reproduced below and can be found through the following link

ESSE 2024 LAUSANNE – Call for Posters and Seminar Papers (unil.ch) 

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54. Waters and Environmental Crisis in the nineteenth century [in person] 

The nineteenth century witnessed intensified environmental problems due to unprecedented demographic, technological; infrastructural, and industrial changes; and through the expansion of agriculture, tourism, commerce, and consumption. In order to consider the complex socioenvironmental issues resulting from these transformations, we invite speakers to address ways in which European and global aqueous environments (oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, lagoons, canals, glaciers, water supplies, sewers, etc) were marked by the impacts of environmental change, in terms of pollution and other insidious impacts of human activity. Speakers may wish to address the ways that water’s primarily benign status was complicated in Romantic and Victorian literature, becoming an ambivalent or frightful site. 

Presentations may cover fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, scientific works, journalism, or art, and might relate (but are not confined) to: 

• Depictions of water in specific locations (real or imagined). 

• Water pollution.

• Water management. 

• Loss or abundance (floods and droughts). 

• Water in science and industry. 

• Global waters: colonial and imperial contexts. 

• Waters and borders. 

• Waters in art and myth. 

• Water tourism, travel and exploration. 

The ESSE seminar format encourages lively participation by speakers and audience members, so papers should be orally presented rather than read, and designed to encourage participatory dialogue. 

Convenors: 

• Emma Sdegno (Università Ca’Foscari, Venezia, Italia) esdegno@unive.it 

• Mark Frost (University of Portsmouth, UK) mark.frost@port.ac.uk

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