CFP: Persistent Spaces: Politics, Aesthetics, and Topography in the 18th- and 19th-Century City

*Persistent Spaces: Politics, Aesthetics, and Topography in the 18th- and
19th-Century City*
Université Paris Diderot, 12-13 December 2013

Proposals due by 13 October 2013

*Keynote Speakers:* Lynda Nead (Birkbeck College) and Stéphane Van Damme
(Sciences Po Paris)

The aim of this two-day conference is to bring together young researchers
to explore the city and its ideologies from a fully  interdisciplinary
perspective. We would like to combine approaches from the fields of
literature and the arts, sociology, philosophy, law, science and
engineering in order to create a dialogue between disciplines and
methodologies. This conference would also establish a dialogue between the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will seek to highlight the
individual specificities of these two periods, but also to understand the
echoes, continuities and breaks between them.

>From the Enlightenment to the late nineteenth century and before urbanism
was fully established as a discipline, the city was constantly being
configured and reconfigured by the joint influences of architects, civil
engineers, political organizations, associations and the informal
‘practices’ of inhabitants. Writers and artists also play a major part in
this process, both picking up on these developments and changing them
through the aesthetics they deploy. 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.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
• Authority, ideology, urban planning and everyday ‘practices’
• Coherence or fragmentation of the urban space (home and workplace, centre
and slums, etc.)
• Geographical juxtapositions / temporal superimpositions of spaces
• Population, mobility and living conditions
• Technological developments and urban networks
• 18th/19th-century continuity and breaks
• 18th-century ideas persisting and materializing in the 19th century
• Comparisons between / specificity of London and Paris

Papers will last for 20 minutes and will be followed by 15-minute
discussions. Abstracts no longer than 300 words should be sent to Clemence
Follea ([email protected]) or Clement Martin ([email protected])
by October 13th, 2013, along with a brief biographical note, which should
not exceed 50 words. The scientific committee examining the papers is
composed of doctoral students from Paris Diderot University: Claire
Deligny; Clémence Follea; Clément Martin; Roisin Quinn-Lautrefin; Estelle
Murail; and Marie Ruiz.

The conference will take place at Paris Diderot University (Paris, 13e
arrondissement), on the 12th-13th December 2013. This event is supported by
the Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones (Université
Paris Diderot).

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