Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies / Journal: Global Nineteenth-Century Studies

Kevin Morrison Discussion

We are pleased to announce the formation of the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, a geographically and disciplinarily diverse network of scholars who share an interest in the world’s connectedness between 1780 and 1914. Unconstrained by the imperial frames that characterized the era's own approach to globalization, the Society encourages a rethinking of the period via biennial world congresses and more frequent regional events; a flagship journal, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, published from spring 2022 by Liverpool University Press; and additional initiatives to be announced in due course. You can learn more about the Society and become a member at www.global19c.com

The Society's journal, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, publishes pioneering essays of transnational, comparative, transimperial, transpacific, and transatlantic significance while also serving as a venue to debate these terms and their corresponding methodologies and epistemologies. Investigating material culture forms, visual and literary texts, ideas, and sentient beings that transcend national boundaries, essays in GNCS are asked to engage critically with mobility and migration, imperialism and colonialism, and production and distribution, as well as travel, technologies, and varieties of exchange. The editorial team welcomes submissions along these lines at global19c@nus.edu.sg.

In addition to publishing research articles, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies has several standing sections. Each section has its own editor who is primarily responsible for curating its intellectual content. The editors invite submissions to each section.   

Creative Histories

Section editor: Trevor R. Getz, San Francisco State University 

In the nineteenth century, as today, people communicated ideas through a vast range of media. This was the era of cartoonists like Emmanuel Poiré, picture journals like Punch and Eshimbun Nihonchi, the invention of the phonograph, and a flowering of puppet and lantern theater around the world. Many of these media conveyed messages and stories from the past, from Gustave Doré’s The Picturesque, Dramatic, and Caricatural History of Holy Russia, arguably the world’s first graphic history, to wayang histories of Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib and other Muslim figures, to ground-breaking data visualizations by W. E. B. DuBois, Florence Nightingale, and Charles Joseph Minard. Similarly, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies will periodically feature the unusual and alternate ways in which contemporary scholars depicted and interpreted the nineteenth century: descriptive maps, comics, data and architectural visualizations, experimental histories, and speculative biographies that mirror the richness of the nineteenth-century world. Reflective essays that engage with issues in the creative rendering of history are also welcome.   

Global Documents 

Section editor: Joshua Ehrlich, University of Macau 

Submissions for this section should present and analyze unpublished textual or visual documents that fit the aims and scope of the journal. If not in English, they should be translated, but original versions may be included when appropriate. Other formats such as roundtable discussions of one or more documents will be considered. For all proposals, the word count should be at least 2,000 words (including footnotes) and should not exceed the length of a standard journal article.   

Transcultural Objects 

Section editor: Priya Maholay-Jaradi, National University of Singapore

Nineteenth-century colonial, industrial, and modernizing technologies accelerated the global circulation of objects. Block-printed textiles from Gujarat and Coromandel catered to the Indonesian and Thai markets. Cartier, Baccarat, and other Euro-American luxury houses engaged Asian royalty in design discussions to craft new editions of jewelry, toiletries, and tableware. Sightings of rare species such as the Rafflesia arnoldii in Sumatra led to worldwide dissemination of actual or pictorial samples for scientific study. Teeming with traders, designers, informants, and scholars, these thoroughfares of the market, catalogue, journal, and exhibition reinvigorated objects with new visual, material, and contextual ideas. As a result, whether natural, hand-crafted, or machine-produced, objects travelled far beyond their place of origin to experience intermixing and transformation. Submissions to this section should address this latter process of transculturation and its cross-border dynamics; we encourage scholars at the same time to augment the constituency of transcultural objects by looking beyond established taxonomies and genres.   

History from Beyond 

Section editor: Kyle Jackson, Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Historians who study the nineteenth-century world are heir to a set of conceptual tools forged by intellectuals in a small part of that world. While euromethodologies have proven illuminating, much historical evidence has been cast aside without good reason, while the lived experience, truths, and knowledges of diverse peoples have been downgraded as “belief.” What alternative ways of doing history have been relegated to the shadows by our discipline’s post-Enlightenment assumptions? Global Nineteenth-Century Studies will periodically feature “History from Beyond”—interventions that seek to open up new questions or approaches beyond disciplinary norms, beyond humans, and beyond euromethodologies. We especially welcome submissions that seek to challenge the core assumptions of Western modernity, close the gap between Western constructions of the past and wider-world realities, decolonize and Indigenize historical storytelling, or more seamlessly integrate non-Western epistemologies, the unknown, or the mysterious into historical narrative.   

Reinterpetations 

Section editor: Tom Ue, Dalhousie University

This section explores reinterpretations of the Victorian period, whether they manifest in the forms of critical editions, neo-Victorian fiction, film, theatre, music, or visual arts. The Victorians were well aware of the complexities inherent in reading and representing their own times. George Gissing, for instance, wrote his seminal study of Charles Dickens (1898) in Siena, Italy, in which he stresses how removed Dickens’ age is from his: “The time which shaped him and sent him forth is so far behind us, as to have become a matter of historical study for the present generation; the time which knew him as one of its foremost figures, and owed so much to the influences of his wondrous personality, is already made remote by a social revolution of which he watched the mere beginning.” In sum, the geographical, historical, cultural, social, and literary distance between the two writers empowers Gissing with a kind of bifocal perspective: “to regard Dickens from the standpoint of posterity; to consider his career, to review his work, and to estimate his total activity in relation to an age which, intelligibly speaking, is no longer our own.” Gissing’s concerns anticipate many of ours as we variously reinterpret the nineteenth century. For this section on “Reinterpretations,” articles that offer individual case studies that examine the recovery of texts or that further theoretical work on adaptation, Steampunk, or the Victorian afterlife are equally at home.   

Periodicals 

Section editor: Helena Goodwyn, Northumbria University 

In rethinking the nineteenth century in global terms, a refocused attention must be paid to the periodical press which has often been figured as a vehicle for increasing democratic freedoms, in its portrayal as the “fourth estate.” This section encourages the submission of articles, roundtables, research reflections, pedagogical interventions and other critical-creative writings that bring new and cross-cultural understandings to existing ideas of such terms as the “global,” “international,” “provincial,” “local,” “transnational,” “colonial,” and “cosmopolitan” in relation to nineteenth-century periodicals. These innovative perspectives will help us to critically re-evaluate the currency of many well-used concepts and to stimulate new directions in periodicals research, as well as in the field of nineteenth-century studies.

You can find more information about the journal, including its distinguished editorial board, and contact information for section editors by visiting the Liverpool University Press website: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/id/111/