The Oceanic Turn in the Long Eighteenth Century: Beyond Disciplinary Territories

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

THE OCEANIC TURN IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY:
BEYOND DISCIPLINARY TERRITORIES
Friday, November 20, 2009
University of California, Riverside

http://ideasandsociety.ucr.edu/oceanicturn

This conference addresses how the maritime worlds and discourses of the long eighteenth century can help us rethink the divisions of knowledge emerging in this era. Engaging scholars working on maritime history, literature, history of science, cartography, geography, museum studies and cultural studies, the conference maps two current debates (the “oceanic turn,” and the fate of the disciplines) onto a particular time and space (eighteenth-century maritime worlds) that played a central role in shaping modern disciplinarity. We aim to defamiliarize traditional narratives of disciplinarity by shifting the debate to oceanic spaces, people, and discourses. One of the panels will be devoted to the circumpolar Arctic Ocean, largely neglected by humanists even within the new oceanic turn, but increasingly of interest since the Enlightenment era, when the unique natural, social and aesthetic properties of this region encircling an ocean gained widespread attention.

Conference organizer: Adriana Craciun

Conference Participants:
Michael Bravo (Cambridge University)
Margaret Cohen (Stanford University)
Christopher Connery (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Adriana Craciun (University of California, Riverside)
Jonathan King (Keeper of the Collections, British Museum)
Neil Safier (University of British Columbia)
Patricia Seed (University of California, Irvine)