Call for Essay Proposals: In Extremis: The Limits Of Life, Death and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth. D/Line: 30 April

IN EXTREMIS: THE LIMITS OF LIFE, DEATH AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LONG NINETEENTH

PROPOSALS OF 500 WORDS (PLEASE ALSO INCLUDE A SHORT BIO) DUE: APRIL 30 2020 (NOTIFICATION BY JUNE)

FINAL ESSAYS OF 7,000-10,000 W0RDS DUE: OCTOBER 31 

Proposals should be emailed to Lucy Cogan and Michelle O’Connell at inextremisconference@gmail.com

Building on the exciting interdisciplinary conference held in January 2020 at University College Dublin, we would like to invite proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection. The collection will explore the ways in which the fundamental understanding of embodied human life and consciousness was challenged by developments in science and medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Spurred on by public experiments and mass casualties resulting from war, famine, disease, poverty and oppression, natural philosophers, poets and novelists, spiritualists and enthusiasts interrogated the limits of death and life. Social and intellectual cross-currents between imaginative and scientific discourses produced a flourishing culture of enquiry in which old certainties and taboos no longer defined the parameters of human existence. However, the body, rather than being tamed and comprehended by advancements in science, seemed more alien than human, a thing apart from consciousness yet intimately tied to mental processes. This interdisciplinary collection will examine the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual life reimagined the boundaries of sex, disease and deformity.

Editors: Lucy Cogan and Michelle O’Connell, School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin