Call for Papers

The Pursuit of Happiness
Sponsored by Bard College and Skidmore College
at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
April 24-26, 2009

Happiness our being's end and aim is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world. --Thomas Carlyle.

Following on the 2008 INCS theme, The Emergence of Human Rights, this conference will focus on the pursuit of happiness, that elusive corollary to life and liberty. What form did happiness and the comprehension of happiness take in the nineteenth century?

How, for example, did the legacy of the American and French Revolutions shape nineteenth-century understandings of happiness? What were the effects of burgeoning industrialism? In keeping with the recent turn to studies of emotion, feeling, and affect within literary studies as well as psychology, economics, history, and philosophy, we invite papers on the nineteenth-century contexts and genealogies for such work. And, in acknowledgment of our 2009 conference location, Saratoga Springs, NY, we particularly encourage papers exploring Victorian pleasure-seeking as having provided popular, if contested, routes to happiness.

Keynote Speakers:

• Robert Frank, Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University and author of Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class(U of California, 2007), The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas(Basic Books, 2007) and Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Success(Princeton UP, 2000).
• Darrin McMahon, Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University and author of Happiness: A History(Atlantic Monthly Books, 2006) and Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity(Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Adam Potkay, Margaret L. Hamilton Professor of English at The College of William and Mary and author of The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism(Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume(Cornell University Press, 2000).

Topics may include:

Luxury and pleasure in a democratic republic Leisure Speculation (gambling, chance) Recreation Health/spas/hygiene Shopping/consumer desire Misery, the absence of happiness Pain, the opposite of pleasure Race, class, gender and ethnic perspectives

Virtue, working for the good of others Wealth Beauty/art Family/friendship/love Rights/liberties Cultivation of emotions Vacations/travel Architecture of happiness Joy

INCS encourages interdisciplinary perspectives integrating: Literature, Law, Political Science, Philosophy, Theology, History, Art History, History of Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Economics, Health Sciences.

200 word abstracts by October 15, 2008 to Deirdre d'Albertis, Bard College via e-mail at: dalberti@bard.edu .  Please include name, academic affiliation, and email address on the abstract.

For more information on INCS see: www.nd.edu/~incshp/. Selected conference papers published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

Deirdre d'Albertis
Bard College

Barbara Black
Skidmore College